Al Qaeda breeds terror in Sahara

Al Qaeda’s terrorism network in North Africa is becoming increasingly active and attracting more recruits, threatening to further destabilize the continent’s already vulnerable Sahara region, U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials said.

The North African faction, which calls itself al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, is still small and largely isolated, numbering a couple of hundred militants based mostly in the vast desert of northern Mali. But signs of stepped-up activity and the group’s advancing potential for growth worry analysts familiar with the region.

The rapid rise of the al Qaeda group in Yemen — which spawned the attempted attack on an airliner on Christmas — is seen by U.S. officials and counterterrorism analysts as evidence that the North African militants could just as quickly take on a broader jihadi mission and become a serious threat to the U.S. and European allies.

The Mali-based militants have yet to show a capability to launch such foreign attacks, but are widening their involvement in kidnapping and the narcotics trade, reaping profits that could be used to expand terrorism operations, officials and analysts said.

Several senior U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials spoke about al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal analysis.

Those advances have set off alarms within the counterterrorism community, which watched as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula quickly transformed over the past year from militants preoccupied with internal Yemeni strife to a potent group recruiting and training insurgents for terrorism missions inside the U.S.

That threat was underscored by the failed Christmas airliner attack, which officials say was planned and directed by Yemeni insurgent leaders.

A key fear is that as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb expands, its criminal and insurgent operations will continue to destabilize the fragile governments of heavily Islamic North Africa, much as it has in Mali. The Maghreb includes the North African nations of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania.

As a result, the U.S. has been working to boost the defenses of poverty-stricken Mali. Last year, the U.S. gave $5 million in trucks and other equipment to Mali’s security forces, and Pentagon funds have been approved to provide training.

But others suggested that nonmilitary aid also is needed.

“For too long, al Qaeda’s growth in this critical region of Africa has been overlooked,” Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, said Monday. “Our embassy presence in many of these countries is quite limited, which handicaps our ability to better understand a region that has become a terrorist safe haven. We need a greater nonmilitary, on-the-ground presence devoted to this part of the world in order to better understand local dynamics, identify emerging threats and prevent future attacks.”

Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former CIA officer, said the North African terrorist group has a larger area in which to operate and a wider Islamic population pool from which to draw, but has not launched the kinds of large-scale attacks initially feared when it became an al Qaeda affiliate three years ago.

“Now, if it is beginning to reorganize, recruit and develop, because of this international potential, it could become a much more dangerous threat,” Mr. Riedel said. “And if there is a role model in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, that is very disturbing.”

Born as an Algerian insurgency in the early 1990s, the group was largely defeated and driven into a swath of ungoverned desert land — about the size of France — in northern Mali. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the group reached out to al Qaeda in an effort to survive. The Islamic Maghreb faction was officially recognized as an al Qaeda affiliate by Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, on the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11. The U.S. and the European Union have designated al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as a terrorist organization.

The group has since absorbed some of al Qaeda’s techniques for roadside bombs and suicide attacks. It has issued occasional videos and statements on jihadi Internet forums.

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