Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

Foro destinado al estudio de la organización, sus líderes, estrategias y comunicados. AQMI, AQAP, ISIL, Al Shabaab, Al Nusrah Front, AQ en el Sinai, Ansar al Sharia y grupos afiliados

Moderadores: Mod. 2, Mod. 5, Mod. 1, Mod. 4, Mod. 3

Mueca
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Kilo, Livio, los argelinos le han dado matarile a Mourad Bouzid (Ami Slimane), líder de AQMI en la rama de reclutamiento. La colaboración de los lugareños ha sido esencial.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNew ... 3Y20090215
easy
LIVIO2000
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Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

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Pues si Kilo, parece que se resisten y de que forma, dos nuevos atentados ocurridos ayer, uno contra un Transporte Militar y otro en un falso control, ocurridos en Tebessa et Boumerdès. ELKHABAR

Huit soldats assassinés et 4 autres blessés à Tebessa et Boumerdès



Huit soldats ont trouvé la mort dans deux opérations terroristes l’une perpétrée à Bordj Menail et la seconde à Tebessa.

El Khabar a appris d’une source bien informée qu’un attentat terroriste a eu lieu, hier, à 13 :30mn au niveau de la route menant vers la région de « Ghrab », située dans la commune de Stah Kentis, à environ 111km au Sud-ouest du chef lieu de la wilaya de Tébessa. Cinq soldats sont morts et quatre autres ont été blessés suite à cet attentat.
Les mêmes sources ont ajouté que cet attentat terroriste a été perpétré à la bombe au Douar de « Ghrab », commune de « Stah Kentis », lors du passage d’un camion militaire transportant plus de 10 soldats. Cet attentat terroriste intervient dans un intervalle de moins de 3 jours de ceux d’El Ogla El Malha et à Tlidjane à Tébessa, qui ont fait un bilan de plus de 6 morts, dont le commandant de la brigade de la Gendarmerie Nationale de la commune de Bir El Ater, en plus de 4 autres blessés.
En plus des dépouilles des cinq morts, les quatre blessés ont été rapidement transférés vers l’hôpital militaire de Constantine. Selon des témoins oculaires, les forces de sécurité ont encerclé la scène du crime, située entre les wilayas les wilayas de Khenchela et de Tébessa.
Les forces de sécurité ont également réussi de démanteler le plus grand réseau de soutien de ces groupes armés, dans cette région et présenter les personnes impliquées au tribunal pénal près la Cour de Tébessa, ont indiqué nos sources.
Par ailleurs, à Bordj Menail, wilaya de Boumerdès 3 militaires ont été assassinés dans un faux barrage. Ces derniers étaient en tenue de civil à bord d’un bus. Les terroristes habillés en militaires avaient fait descendre tous les passagers et au moment de la fouille un des militaires leur précisent qu’ils sont des collègues. Les terroristes assassinent aussitôt les trois militaires.

16-02-2009
Par B. Souhil/ Rubrique Traduction
LOS OJOS SE FIAN DE ELLOS MISMOS, LAS OREJAS DE LOS DEMAS
KS

Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

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Estupendo artículo en el NY Times sobre el Sahel. De lectura obligada para quien quiera enterarse de lo que pasa en la zona:


The Saharan Conundrum

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magaz ... 3&emc=eta1

By NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE
Published: February 13, 2009

IN THE MONTHS AFTER 9/11, American forces in Afghanistan bombed the Taliban and, in vain, hunted for Osama bin Laden, while in Washington counterterrorism experts worried about “the next Afghanistan,” a safe haven where terrorists would train, test their weapons and organize attacks on the United States. These discussions produced a double-barreled national-security strategy that dominated President George W. Bush’s tenure. The first element of the strategy was to identify and eliminate terrorist networks that already existed. The second was to prevent new networks from flourishing by promoting open, democratic societies that, the thinking went, would be less susceptible to Al Qaeda’s message than closed ones. Hard and soft power would be brought to bear on all the potential Afghanistans, while Afghanistan itself would be kept from regressing.

The list of candidates for the next Afghanistan was long. Just about every Muslim-majority country, or even those with sizable Muslim minorities, was considered suspect. Intelligence analysts fixed their attention on remote islands and jungles in the Philippines and Indonesia and on the rugged mountains of Pakistan’s tribal areas. Africa emerged as one of the greatest areas of concern, and the Sahel, a scrubby band of ungoverned terrain straddling Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, proved especially troublesome. An Islamist government in Sudan was host to bin Laden for five years during the 1990s. In Algeria, an Islamist insurgency ultimately commanded by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its French acronym, G.S.P.C., was entering its second bloody decade. And in Mauritania only 3.5 million people occupied an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, making it — despite decades of oppressive military rule — one of the least-controlled parts of the world.

The Sahel soon became a laboratory for the United States to test its policies in the “global war on terror.” In 2002, the State Department started the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a counterterrorism program that involved working with local militaries in Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania. In 2005, the program, in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development and the Pentagon, expanded under a new name to Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Special Forces operatives remain in some of the countries year-round to train local armies at battling insurgencies and rebellions and to prevent bin Laden and his allies from expanding into the region.

Things haven’t quite gone according to plan. Rebels still threaten to overrun the capital of Chad, and in Sudan the violence in Darfur became worse. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda established sanctuaries in the Sahel, and in 2006 it acquired a North African franchise. Terrorist attacks in the region increased in both number and lethality.

Almost since the war on terror began, the Bush administration has been criticized for lecturing the Iraqis and the Iranians about democracy while supporting authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Despite an avowed national-security strategy that prized both democratic values and killing terrorists, the emphasis almost always fell on the latter. But in some places at least, the administration’s approach to counterterrorism has undergone significant changes. As the terrorist threat appeared to change its nature, certain administration policy makers responded with a level of nuance rarely associated with George W. Bush.

Nowhere was this shift more evident than in Mauritania, where, last summer, a military coup toppled a democratically elected government. The generals justified the coup on security grounds. The United States responded by suspending its military aid even as the junta highlighted the threat it faced from Al Qaeda. A month after the coup, militants claiming to be associated with Al Qaeda ambushed a military convoy in northern Mauritania and killed 12 soldiers. Was the United States putting its commitment to democracy ahead of its commitment to fighting terrorists? Or was the war on terror changing, with the United States no longer seeing every jihadist franchise as an existential threat?

I. The Democracy Agenda

“I have always thought that democracy was our best antiterror weapon,” Mark Boulware, the American ambassador to Mauritania, told me when I met him in Washington last fall. Boulware arrived in Mauritania at an opportune time. In April 2007, Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi became president after the country’s first transparent election. Cooperation with the United States on security issues immediately resumed, ending a two-year hiatus that followed a coup in 2005. With Abdallahi’s presidency, the Bush administration’s two dominant priorities, fighting terrorism and promoting democracy, appeared to dovetail perfectly.

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte flew to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, for Abdallahi’s inauguration ceremony. Months later, Bush invited Abdallahi to an intimate discussion among emerging democracies during the United Nations General Assembly meeting. Washington welcomed Mauritania into its Threshold Program, an anteroom to full membership in the Millennium Challenge Account — the flagship of the Bush administration’s approach to development aid, where funds became available only after countries achieved a certain score on a range of good-government indexes.

The democratic movement in Mauritania did not last long. Last August, Abdallahi’s generals overthrew him after he tried to fire them. The American partnership with Mauritania promptly collapsed. A high-tech American surveillance plane, which had been based in Mauritania to fly over the northern part of the country, searching for Al Qaeda training camps, was removed, as were the 80 or so Army and Marine Special Forces troops that were training a counterterrorism unit. The Threshold Program funds dried up, and Mauritania’s chances for membership in the Millennium Challenge Account disappeared.

“We were using Mauritania as an example of how countries should move forward with elections,” Dell Dailey, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, told me. Dailey served more than three decades in the army’s shadowy world of Special Operations, eventually leading such operations in Iraq and Afghanistan before joining the State Department in the summer of 2007. Dailey said the American message was simple: “When you hold elections, there are certain benefits, like assistance in security and law enforcement and economic development. The three pillars of trying to defeat terrorism and build a good society are development, good governance and security. In Mauritania, they were moving in that direction. The coup was extremely disappointing.”

The junta tried to convince the world otherwise, claiming that Abdallahi had been weak on terrorism. The new leaders said that, by legalizing an Islamist party and meeting with moderate Islamists to request help in challenging the growing militant Salafist movement in the country, Abdallahi paved the way for a string of terrorist attacks in Mauritania over the past two years. The military’s charges were ignored by Washington, however.

To this day, Washington considers Abdallahi the legitimate president of Mauritania. Two capitals coexist: one in Nouakchott, where Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz occupies the presidential palace; and one in Abdallahi’s hometown, Lemden, where he lives in internal exile. (On the anniversary of Mauritania’s independence day, Bush sent Abdallahi a congratulatory letter there.) Even the vocabularies used in the two capitals are different: Abdallahi and his supporters slip the words “democracy” and “election” into every sentence, while the junta talks about “terrorism” and “Al Qaeda” at every turn.

Now, the junta waits for President Barack Obama to give the country a fresh look. “We hope that your new president, a young man with the interests of Africa in mind, will be more understanding of our situation,” Mohamed Ould Moine, the minister of communication, told me.

II. The Franchise

When not pushing democracy, the Bush administration focused on finding and killing terrorists. Missiles from Predator drones were fired at militants in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. In the Sahel, counterterrorism officials faced people like Sidi Ould Sidna, a young Mauritanian who had a strange career as a foot soldier in an Al Qaeda affiliate. Sidna’s story demonstrates both how America’s jihadist adversaries have become more complicated than the Bush administration first envisioned and how, in the end, some figures on the administration’s counterterrorism team fashioned an unexpected response.

Late last year, I spoke to a number of sources in Mauritania and the United States, both inside and outside of government, about counterterrorism operations in the region and the activities of Al Qaeda associates there like Sidna. Many could not identify themselves in print because of the nature of their work, but from these interviews I was able to piece together a picture of jihadism in this part of the world.

Sidna grew up in a poor neighborhood of Nouakchott called Toujanine. When I went there one evening in December, I found kids playing soccer at dusk in a wide dirt road. Goats rummaged through trash that filled a ditch about five feet from the front door of Sidna’s home. According to friends, neighbors and relatives, Sidna had a reputation as a scrappy kid. “Sidi wasn’t a thief, because thieves rob you and run,” one childhood friend told me. “Sidi took your watch or your T-shirt right in front of you.” By his midteens, Sidna was smoking hashish, drinking wine and hanging out with an older crowd. He liked to dance and earned the nickname Lambada. Besides robbing people, he also stole cars. Friends and law-enforcement authorities claim that he was involved in multiple rapes.

But his conscience apparently caught up with him by his late teens. He joined a friend at a mahadra — an Islamic seminary — outside Nouakchott. He spent several months there and, like many restless young men in the region, grew fond of listening to jihadist audio recordings, particularly those of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Iraq’s Al Qaeda franchise, that circulated around the mahadra.

“Why Zarqawi?” I asked the friend who took Sidna to the mahadra. “What made his sermons appealing?”

“Everyone in the Muslim world wants to see American tanks blown up and their troops killed,” he said. “But bin Laden and Zarqawi were the only ones actually doing it. Sidna admired them for that.”

Sidna returned home to Toujanine a changed, yet no mellower, person. As part of his Zarqawi-fueled indoctrination, he adopted the ideology of takfir, or excommunication, which some extremists use to justify violence against nonbelievers. He began converting some of his fellow gang members into militant Salafists. Sidna ordered his sisters to cover their heads, patrolled the neighborhood for unmarried couples walking together and spent long hours arguing with his father, a Sufi, during which times he called him an infidel. He told his younger brother that he wanted to wage jihad against the Americans. Then Sidna headed off to a training camp.

In the spring of 2006, Sidna traveled to a camp in northern Mali run by the G.S.P.C., the notorious Algerian-Salafi group. He prayed that those running the camp would send him to Iraq to fight against Americans. The invasion of Afghanistan, followed by the one in Iraq, attracted young men from all over North Africa eager to wage jihad against the United States. Fernando Reinares, the director of a program on global terrorism at Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid, says G.S.P.C. camps served as one of the main conduits of foreign fighters into Iraq. “They recruited individuals at the local level, trained them and then sent them to Iraq,” he said. European police reported a growing number of G.S.P.C. cells in major cities. In 2002, authorities in Italy claimed to have disrupted a G.S.P.C. plot in Bologna to bomb the Basilica of San Petronio, which has a 15th-century fresco of the Prophet Muhammad being tormented by demons in hell.

Sidna was disappointed when he reached the camp. The G.S.P.C. was in the midst of an overhaul. He found that the group was no longer looking for able-bodied young men to dispatch to Iraq, in part because of American pressure on North African leaders to clamp down on the migration of jihadists to Iraq. But it was also by choice. Now the G.S.P.C. had a new mission, to recruit non-Algerian militants to spread jihad south of Algeria.

Sidna fit into the group’s plans perfectly. The G.S.P.C.’s finances couldn’t keep pace with its ambitions, however. So G.S.P.C. leaders reached out to Zarqawi, who, until he was killed by American forces in Iraq in June 2006, enjoyed not only name recognition but also a seemingly endless pile of money. With Zarqawi as matchmaker, the G.S.P.C. courted Al Qaeda itself. After lengthy negotiations, bin Laden’s deputy, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, announced the “blessed union” between the G.S.P.C. and Al Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2006. He declared that the merger would be “a bone in the throat of American and French crusaders.” Months later, the G.S.P.C. proclaimed its new name: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or A.Q.I.M.

A.Q.I.M. immediately set its sights on Mauritania. Not only was the country mostly vacant space and therefore a potential site for training camps, but as a close ally of the United States and one of only three Arab League states to maintain full diplomatic relations with Israel, it presented an easy propaganda target. The G.S.P.C. had already sent Khaddim Ould Semane, a Mauritanian militant, back to Nouakchott with instructions to establish a cell. Semane named his group Al-Ansar Allah al-Murabitun, the Army of Allah in the Lands of Murabitun. (Murabitun was the 11th-century Islamic empire in North Africa.) He would eventually become a leader of A.Q.I.M. in Mauritania. Sidna was sent back to Nouakchott with orders to stay on the lookout for possible targets. Sidna returned to Mauritania feeling frustrated, according to his younger brother, whom I spoke to in December. Sidna knew how to shoot a gun (having served a year in the Mauritanian army), had an extensive background in theft and showed the vigor of a fundamentalist. But if he wanted to be part of Al Qaeda, he would have to earn the privilege.

Eight months after Abdallahi’s election established Mauritania’s democratic credentials and won it new support in the West, Sidna struck. On Christmas Eve 2007, Sidna, now 21, and two accomplices decided to stalk five French tourists just outside the town of Aleg, 150 miles east of Nouakchott. The French were picnicking in the shade of a tree around lunchtime when, authorities charge, Sidna or one of his accomplices opened fire with a Kalashnikov and killed four of them. The militants hopped into hired cars and escaped. After a three-week manhunt, through Senegal, Gambia and finally Guinea-Bissau, French intelligence agents arrested them.

On the day of his extradition to Mauritania, Sidna looked more like a club kid than a terrorist: blue jeans, brown leather jacket, clean-shaven. As he strutted past a battery of cameramen while walking toward the tan DC-3 waiting to fly him back to Nouakchott, he stared into one camera and said, “Guinea-Bissau will pay dearly for mistreating God’s warriors.” The tape played on Mauritanian television and radio for days.

Sidna escaped from prison three months later. He hid in a two-story villa that had been rented by Semane in an upscale neighborhood of Nouakchott. It was painted yellow with a white railing that wrapped around the upstairs porch. Inside, a handful of terrorists had amassed weapons, explosives and suicide belts. The day before Sidna arrived, they stole a car and parked it in the garage. (They didn’t know it, but the car was being used by Mauritania’s ambassador to the United States.)

Days after Sidna’s jailbreak, the police responded to a tip and encircled the yellow house. The militants shot and killed one policeman, sparking an intense gun battle that pockmarked the villa. The sound of automatic weapons resounded through Nouakchott’s usually placid streets. After 15 minutes, the terrorists piled into the ambassador’s car. Sidna filled ammunition clips in the backseat while Semane drove and others sat on the ledges of the open windows. As the garage door opened, the car burst out, broke through the police cordon and raced down the dirt roads. A terrorist was shot and fell out of a car window. But Sidna, once again, had disappeared.

Police arrested him three weeks later. On the day he was brought before the court, Sidna taunted the judge, shouting, “Our martyrs are in heaven, yours are in hell.”

The Algerian leader of A.Q.I.M. later said that Sidna and his companions were “connected” with his group, although the murder in Aleg, at least, seemed to bear Sidna’s personal stamp more than that of Al Qaeda or its North African franchise. “This is the shape of the future for Al Qaeda — free agents laying claim to the mantle of ideological coherence, all of which goes under the name of Al Qaeda,” said Mike McGovern, a professor at Yale University and former West Africa director for the International Crisis Group, an independent research and advocacy group.

III. End of the War As We Know It?

Are legions of these “free agent” jihadis, operating loosely in the name of Al Qaeda, more worrying or less worrying than a centralized Al Qaeda? Western intelligence agencies no longer agree on the nature of the threat. The Europeans generally consider A.Q.I.M. a far greater danger than do the Americans. This past fall, Germany’s intelligence service stated publicly that A.Q.I.M. had established training camps in the desert of northeastern Mauritania, in addition to those already present in Algeria and Mali. But when I asked one American counterterrorism official about the claim, he sniggered. “What are we calling a training camp?” he said. “Guys shooting small firearms? That happens at the local skeet range. A training camp suggests a level of organizational structure that I don’t think is there.”

In the early years after 9/11, scare-mongering about Al Qaeda dominated counterterrorism analysis in the United States. Almost anyone who partook in violence within the general confines of the Islamic world was tagged as a potential member of Al Qaeda, regardless of whom or what they were fighting for.

But political and religious violence in the Sahel usually had nothing to do with militias fighting for Shariah or bidding to join Al Qaeda. More often than not, the fighting involved long-running territorial disputes; ethnic, clan or tribal quibbles like those constantly plaguing Chad; and Muslims fighting Muslims, seen most vividly in Darfur. It is difficult to isolate and identify the extent to which Islam does or doesn’t play into each instance of violence in the Muslim world.

There is little question that A.Q.I.M. is composed of anti-American Islamic militants, but some regional experts stress that this doesn’t mean they take orders or receive money from bin Laden — or pose a serious threat to American security. What, if any, are the entitlements of membership in the Al Qaeda franchise? I asked Dell Dailey, the counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department, what the G.S.P.C. gained by changing its name to A.Q.I.M. He told me that when A.Q.I.M. members joined with Al Qaeda they received a “burst of money, maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars, that allowed them to knock out a few early suicide bombings with a strong Al Qaeda flavor.” The string of lethal attacks included explosions aimed at government buildings and naval barracks, and the bombing of a United Nations building in Algeria that killed more than 40 people, including, for the first time, a large number of foreigners. Dailey added, “Once they jumped on the A.Q. name, they showed an internationalist choice of targets that G.S.P.C. just hadn’t done before.”

Once they had spent the initial infusion of money, however, A.Q.I.M. reverted to its former ways. These methods included car theft, credit-card fraud, smuggling and kidnapping. Jean-Luc Marret, a fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris who is also affiliated with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Transatlantic Relations, said that A.Q.I.M.’s fund-raising “is not about Saudi banking and global Islamic N.G.O.’s, but small, encrusted cells, trabendo (contraband) and petty smuggling.”

Dell Dailey said that A.Q.I.M.’s impulse to indulge in criminal activities is partly born out of the fact that they “can’t connect to the central branch anymore,” which affects personnel and finances. Not only are “raw recruits” like Sidna less able to get to Iraq or Afghanistan, but as an organization, Dailey told me, Al Qaeda is more constrained now. “They can’t move, communicate, recruit and post money as successfully as they could in the early days after 9/11,” he said. “We have given Al Qaeda too much credit from 9/11 onwards. We have embellished them more than they deserve.”

But just because aspiring militants in Algeria, Morocco or Mauritania might find it tougher to buy a plane ticket to Amman and slip across the border into Iraq doesn’t mean their grievances have disappeared. With, in the words of one American military official, “the demand signal [for jihadists] way down in Iraq,” there appears to be a reverse migration of North African fighters coming home to join A.Q.I.M. A result has been an injection of free-agent militants into the Sahel with crisscrossing loyalties, and no one is sure who is in command. There are even rumors of splits among the A.Q.I.M. leadership. “The A.Q.I.M. folks in northern Mali are not a monolithic group,” the official, who is a specialist in North Africa, told me. “Are the Mauritanians part of A.Q.I.M.? The debate remains unresolved. Some of them are taking orders directly from A.Q.I.M. Some have gone to the camps and then went back to Mauritania to start their own franchise. And there’s some home-grown factor. In Mauritania you see all of it.”

IV. The Attack

In early September, a month after the coup, top Mauritanian army officials learned that five vehicles carrying A.Q.I.M. fighters had crossed from northern Mali into Mauritania and were racing across the desert toward Zouerate, an iron-mining town about 500 miles north of Nouakchott. Zouerate is the heart of Mauritania’s economy. Iron accounts for almost half of the nation’s exports. Any disruption in Zouerate’s daily routine could cripple the country. A hastily organized government patrol — composed of 4 light-brown Land Cruisers, 19 soldiers, an officer, a civilian guide and 2 .50-caliber mounted machine guns — headed into the desert to take on the militants.

“Al Qaeda wants to destabilize our country,” Col. Mohamed Ould El Hadi, Mauritania’s director of national security, told me last month in his office in Nouakchott. It has had considerable success already. Even though A.Q.I.M.’s attacks have been less grand in scale than the bombing of the United Nations building in Algiers in December 2007, its Mauritanian operations have proved more debilitating. The murder of the four French tourists in late 2007, followed by a gun assault on the Israeli Embassy in Nouakchott in early 2008, dealt a devastating blow to the tourism industry. Not two weeks after the French tourists were killed, organizers of the annual Paris-Dakar Rally, whose route normally covers a considerable stretch of Mauritania, canceled the race. (The 2009 rally relocated to South America.) Some estimate that the number of tourists who visit Mauritania is down by half.

No one in the patrol sent from Zouerate had received American counter-terrorism training, and they soon went from hunters to hunted. Shortly after dark, they discovered a line of fresh tire tracks in the sand — made by A.Q.I.M. fighters, who had camped on a dune in the distance. The patrol motored up the tracks while the militants watched the headlights bounce over the dunes. The militants waited as the lights grew brighter and the whine of the engines of the Land Cruisers grew louder. The lead vehicle had just climbed into view when A.Q.I.M. opened fire.

Initial reports suggested that A.Q.I.M. had kidnapped the soldiers. Hoping to stop the terrorists before they returned to their sanctuary in northern Mali, the Mauritanian military asked the United States for help. The Americans refused, reaffirming the position that the junta should restore Abdallahi first.

Two days after the ambush, while the U.S. Embassy was still refusing to assist the ruling junta and the search for the missing soldiers continued, A.Q.I.M. issued a communiqué. The group boasted of a “new attack in the city of Zouerate in northern Mauritania against those who obey the Jews.” The communiqué went on, “By God’s grace, the brigades of Mujahideen set an ambush for the army of unbelief and apostasy that managed to take 12 soldiers prisoner, including a commander by the rank of captain . . . while the rest of Allah’s enemies escaped, fleeing their failure and defeat.” The next day, a Mauritanian official told me, a search-and-rescue team moved to an area where vultures were circling overhead and found 12 bloated, naked corpses, lined up side by side. Three of them were booby-trapped with dynamite. All but one was beheaded.

At the end of its second term, the Bush administration’s strategy for the war on terror remained within the framework in which the war was first conceived — destroy terrorist networks and promote democracy — but the manner in which those principles were put into effect had clearly changed. Even someone like Dell Dailey, who was deeply involved for years in fighting terrorists with traditional military tactics, had come to reject the idea of embracing a military government in Mauritania just because of the presence of an Al Qaeda affiliate inside the country. In its final year, the Bush administration seemed to understand that, in places like Pakistan, it had created legions of enemies with its unflinching support for President Pervez Musharraf. It hoped to avoid doing the same thing in Mauritania, even as the junta, like Musharraf, decried the former civilian leaders as corrupt and weak on terrorism.

The Obama administration is continuing the recalibration of counterterrorism. President Obama has promised to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently cautioned against the militarization of foreign policy. “Armed forces may not always be the best choice to take the lead,” he said during a speech in Washington in January, adding later that “we need to reallocate roles and resources in a way that places our military as an equal among many in government.” Similar themes have been echoed lately by the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and others engaged in counterterrorism policy. The coup by the Mauritanian junta may have been badly timed. Part of the new strategic thinking in Washington involves being less optimistic about the power of militaries to solve political problems.

The war against Al Qaeda will undoubtedly continue, but a more nuanced analysis of Al Qaeda has led to a more nuanced approach to combating terrorism and a reconsideration of how the strategy that guided the war on terror in its early years should be put into effect. This is partly a result of new thinking in Washington and, according to security officials, partially a result of bin Laden’s questionable business model: the franchise. “Where G.S.P.C. was, to where A.Q.I.M. is today, I just don’t see the merger as a force multiplier for them,” a senior defense official familiar with Special Operations told me. The war on terror is being reconceived, and the result may not look very much like a war at all.
kilo009
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Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

Mensaje por kilo009 »

35 detenidos en Argelia relacionados con AQMI, entre ellos libios (5), tunecinos (9), marroquíes (8) y mauritanos (9).

Interesante:
8 of them are Moroccans involved in terrorist activities with Al-Qaeda group named El Ghoraba (foreigners), while the number of Libyan terrorists reached 5; they were in their way to fiefs of GSPC.
http://www.elkhabar.com/quotidienFrEn/l ... =1&cahed=1
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Mueca
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Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

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Dos artículos a tener en cuenta sobre Al-Qaeda en el Magreb y nuestros intereses en la zona:
Al-Qaeda thrives in the Sahara deadlock
By Intissar Fakir

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp ... _id=100973

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Once only a minor concern, Al-Qaeda's presence in North Africa has grown into a threat with potential consequences for Europe and the United States. The 2006 alliance between Al-Qaeda and the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat led to the creation of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which continues to expand its presence in the poorly controlled border areas of Maghreb and Sahel countries. In 2005, the United States began a largely military initiative, the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, and called on Algeria, Morocco, and several Sahel countries to combat terrorist networks in their midst. But the effort has borne little fruit. Algeria and Morocco could confront Al-Qaeda by mounting coordinated offensives, but relentless antipathy over the ongoing Western Sahara conflict has dogged their efforts.

What began as a messy postcolonial land squabble after the Spanish withdrawal and the subsequent Moroccan annexation of the Western Sahara in 1975 has turned into a festering 30-year conflict over the contested territory. Today, the area is still claimed by both Morocco and the Polisario Front, a rebel movement exiled in and supported by Algeria, and it has become a liability for both countries.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb thrives in the lawlessness of the isolated desert regions of southern Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, northern Mali, and the Western Sahara. The loose alliance appeals to disaffected youth and sustains itself by smuggling drugs and other goods and by kidnapping people for ransom. The 2003 Casablanca bombings, the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the attempted 2007 bombing of the United States Embassy in Morocco, and attacks later that year targeting the Algerian president and prime minister have all shown that the stakes are high and rising for Morocco and Algeria alike.

The international community is beginning to recognize the importance of North African security. On March 19, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos urged greater international involvement in resolving the Western Sahara dispute, calling on France and the United States in particular to help mediate. In January 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed an American diplomat, Christopher Ross, as his new special envoy for the Western Sahara, a job formerly held by the Dutch diplomat, Peter Van Walsum, and the former US Secretary of State, James Baker, both of whom ran into familiar patterns of intransigence. Ross inherits an unenviable portfolio; Morocco remains as unlikely as ever to agree to a referendum that offers independence for the territory, and the Polisario and Algeria will settle for nothing less.

To date, the United Nations proposals have all been unsatisfactory to at least one of the three parties. The proposed UN referendum on independence signed in 1991 died when the Polisario and Morocco disagreed over who in the Western Sahara should have the right to vote. In 2001, Morocco signed on to the first version of the Baker plan, under which the Western Sahara would become an autonomous region of Morocco, but Polisario and Algeria predictably rejected the plan. In 2003, Baker revised the plan to include autonomy and a referendum of the entire Western Saharan population, including the Polisario-aligned refugees in camps in Algeria. Algeria and Polisario signed on, as did the UN Security Council, but without Morocco's cooperation the deal fell through. Today, Morocco offers "greater autonomy" for Western Sahara, but without any concrete details.


A fifth round of UN-sponsored negotiations is expected, but promises little immediate progress. In a recent interview with an Algerian newspaper, Polisario leaders threatened to return to armed resistance if Morocco tried to obstruct UN efforts. Yielding to Algerian and Polisario demands would be extremely unpopular among Moroccan nationalists. Similarly, Algerian moderates find themselves in a game they cannot win; giving in to Moroccan demands would make them appear complicit in a colonial enterprise, not to mention losers in a regional power play.

UN envoy Ross' prospects seem poor unless he can bring Algeria to the negotiating table by making the Western Sahara part of a broader deal that would include reopening the borders between Morocco and Algeria, and even economic cooperation.

Although a solution for Western Sahara seems as far away as ever at present, the international community's need to control the rapidly degenerating situation in the Sahel and resulting terrorist threats might eventually change the dynamics. With their internal sovereignty already in question, Algeria's leaders should be mindful that it is not in their interest to have a failing state on their border. And Morocco should realize that the Polisario challenge to traditional notions of territorial integrity might no longer be the greatest threat facing the monarchy.

Intissar Fakir is assistant editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin and was previously program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa program at the Center for International Private Enterprise. This commentary is reprinted with permission from the Arab Reform Bulletin. It can be accessed online at: www.carnegieendowment.org/arb, (c) 2009, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
El segundo:
Algerian militants strike from eyries

By Heba Saleh in Ait Hidja east of Algiers

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cbfdce88-2912 ... ck_check=1

Published: April 14 2009 18:13 | Last updated: April 14 2009 18:13

The locals in the mountain village of Ait Hidja still speak of the night six months ago when members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) decapitated a prison warden and set fire to his car.

Aftermath of a 2007 attack on the UN’s Algiers HQ

“The night they cut his head there was such terror in the village,” says Ahcene Idja, an unemployed university graduate. “Then they kidnapped a man and held him hostage until his family paid ransom.”

The now-abandoned stone cottage where the killing took place stands on a country road rising from the valley to the village. The burnt hulk of the car lies in the vegetation outside.

Algeria’s Bouteflika set for re-election - Apr-07Algeria’s Bouteflika to seek third term - Feb-12Algeria lifts presidential term limits - Nov-12Islamist militants rise again in Algeria - Aug-31Algeria bombing kills 43 - Aug-19Algeria tightens foreign investor rules - Aug-11“Anyone close to the state is a target.” says a local official. “The cottage was a bar serving alcoholic drinks. They came at night and searched everyone there and when they found he was a prison guard they killed him.”

Ait Hidja is in the Djudjura mountains in the Berber-speaking region of Kabylia 100 kilometres (62 miles) east of Algiers. This is a landscape of craggy peaks, wooded slopes and isolated villages. Although peace has largely returned to Algeria after the near-civil war of the 1990s, in this corner of the country a low-level insurgency continues, with no end in sight.

Suspected AQIM militants staged an ambush 350km east of Algiers, killing three security guards working for a Brazilian company and abducting one. On the same day a bomb killed a police officer on a road near the town of Bouira on the western edge of Kabylia.

The region’s mountains have been the stomping grounds of Islamist militants who took up arms against the state when the army aborted elections in 1991 to prevent an Islamist victory.

AQIM is the latest incarnation of a group of hard-core militants left over from that earlier insurgency. The group placed itself under the banner of al-Qaeda in 2006 in an attempt to revive its flagging fortunes because its ranks had been depleted by army action and amnesties offered by the state.

Villagers in Ait Hidja and nearby hamlets say they often see militants passing through after dark on their way up and down the mountain. Sometimes they stop to buy provisions from local shops, always paying for what they take.

‘When they come into a shop everyone leaves,” says the official. “They sometimes go through the village twice a week, sometimes once a month. They are armed and we know they are not from here. I think our region is their refuge so they try not to harm anyone, except if they fall on a policeman.”

Local officials say the militants fund themselves by kidnapping businessmen for ransom, and sometimes extorting money from shopkeepers. A local official spoke of 39 kidnappings in the past three years.

He says no one knows the exact location of the militants’ hideouts. The lands above the village have been off limits for many years.

After allying itself with al-Qaeda AQIM carried out suicide attacks against the prime minister’s office and a UN headquarters in Algiers killing dozens of people.

The group seems to have since decided to restrict itself to military and security targets, although civilians often end up as collateral damage. Experts believe the change in tactics could mean the group has been weakened or that it has decided to try to spare civilians to avoid alienating the population.

“The suicide bombings tarnished them in the eyes of the people,” says Hmida Layachi, a newspaper editor and expert on Algeria’s Islamist groups. “They were losing the image that they were only fighting the rulers so they started avoiding operations in Algiers and other big cities.”

He believes there are 800 to 1,200 militants in the mountains of central and eastern Algeria in comparison with an estimated 40,000 armed insurgents during the 1990s.

AQIM also has groups in the Sahara desert in the south of the country. These have been roaming the borders with neighbouring countries, recruiting and training militants from Mauretania, Mali, Niger and Nigeria. The groups in the desert are small,but perform a crucial function by ensuring that a smuggled weapons and explosives reach their colleagues in the north.

A US military official says: “Right now if it weren’t for the logistic supply from southern Algeria and northern Mali, the group would be on its last leg.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

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AQMI ha amenazado al Gobierno británico con matar un rehén de esa nacionalidad si no ponen en libertad en 20 días a Abu Qatada.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 175024.ece
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Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

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Haze no mucho lei en la revista militar que se llama ejercito un estudio sobre los campamentos diseminados por el magret intentare escanearlo y ponerlo aqui, son unos 50 sobre todo en argelia y cerca de la frontera con mauritaria pero algunos tambien en marruecos y una pregunta ¿ que espera la OTAN para actuar quizas cuando ataque melilla o ceuta como en bombay?

LA PACIFICACION SOLO HACE MAS FUERTE AL AGRESOR
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Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

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Pues asi es Triton, parece que ya esta en marcha el dispositivo. 4 países están preparando un ataque militar, la más grande de su tipo, contra "los afganos Sahel". Fuente ELKHABAR
L’Algérie a envoyé un important matériel militaire vers le Mali
4 pays préparent une attaque militaire, la plus grande du genre, contre « les Afghans du Sahel »

L’Algérie, le Mali, le Niger et la Mauritanie ont décidé d’effectuer une opération militaire, la plus grande et la plus importante du genre, contre les groupes terroristes dans les fiefs du Sahara appartenant à l’organisation d’Al-Qaida du Maghreb notamment les régions frontalières appelées dans les milieux sécuritaires « deuxième région Afghane ».
L’opération militaire contre Al-Qaida dans les régions frontalières communes entre les quatre pays est entrée en phase préparatoire. Les services de sécurité et des renseignements, notamment Maliens et Algériens, ont procédé à la collecte d’un grand nombre possible de renseignements. Le Mali et le Niger ont présenté à l’Algérie la liste des besoins militaires et logistiques. L’Algérie a accepté selon une source bien informée d’aider les forces de ces pays avec moyens logistiques importants avec la couverture aérienne et l’appui par des avions de guerre et appuyer toute activité de combat pour ces pays contre les terroristes. Les premières aides ont commencé à arriver hier au Mali.
Une source sécuritaire s’est réservée de divulguer le moment exact de l’attaque contre les terroristes et les gangs criminels, mais des informations recueillies de l’entourage des chargés de l’opération, ont indiqué que la fin de la crise des deux otages Britannique et Suisse veut dire le début du compte à rebours pour lancer l’attaque, et que le moment propice pour attaquer le groupe de Yahia Abi Amar sera le mois de Juin 2009, car la saison estivale au Sahara est la période pour les encercler et il se peut que ces pays soient contraints d’attendre l’été 2010 si jamais le rendez-vous de l’attaque est retardé.


05-05-2009
Par : A. I / Traduit par H. Benyahia

.- Saludos
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Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

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Londres parece preocupado por la vida de sus ciudadanos retenidos, como rehenes, en caso de escalada militar
Argelia pide a Gran Bretaña cortar todo contacto con Al Qaeda. ELKHABAR
Londres semble inquiète sur la vie de son ressortissant otage en cas d’escalade militaire
L’Algérie appelle la Grande Bretagne à rompre tout contact avec Al-Qaida


Les offensives militaires contre Al-Qaida dans la région d’Ain Sakane au Nord du Mali ont commencé. La Grande Bretagne et la Suisse ont demandé de reporter ces opérations jusqu’à ce que la crise des deux otages détenus par la branche d’Al-Qaida au Sahel soit résolue.
Après avoir découvert des contacts entre les Renseignements Britanniques et les ravisseurs des deux otages, l’Algérie a refusé de reporter l’exécution de la campagne contre le terrorisme.
Des rapports sécuritaires ayant été élaborés dans la deuxième semaine du mois d’Avril dernier, ont affirmé qu’il y a eu des contacts entre l’un des membres dirigeants d’Al-Qaida au Maghreb et un activiste Salafiste résidant en France. La conversation entre ces derniers portait sur la libération de l’otage Britannique et son ami Suisse.
Le contact établi entre la branche extérieure des Renseignements Britanniques et le commandement d’Al-Qaida au Maghreb, à travers leurs intermédiaires, à savoir, des activistes Salafistes installés en Europe, pour la libération de l’otage Britannique, a suscité la colère du Gouvernement algérien qui a riposté par des opérations militaires contre Al-Qaida dans les frontières.
Ces contacts affirment, selon les sources d’El Khabar, que les renseignements Britanniques tentent de convaincre le commandement d’Al-Qaida au Maghreb de libérer l’otage Britannique Eden Dyer. Ces renseignements ont suscité la colère du commandement politique en Algérie qui a qualifié cette réaction d’ « inadmissible » avec des rebelles dépourvus de légalité et répondu par une escalade militaire dans le Sud contre Al-Qaida.


09-05-2009
Par A. Brahim/ Traduit par S. Ahmed Ouamer




.- Saludos
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Re: Al Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico (AQMI)

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Pues las presiones son las presiones, y cuando anda Reino Unido de por medio suelen ser efectivas:

Sahel countries suspend huge military attack against Al-Qaeda for 2 weeks

En principio un país europeo ha comentado que las negociaciones para la liberación de los rehenes estaba en buen término, y pedía dos semanas para ver si el proceso negociador podía liberar a los ciudadanos europeos sin tener que lamentar alguna de sus vidas.
As a European country confirms 2 Westerners release in few upcoming weeks
Sahel countries suspend huge military attack against Al-Qaeda for 2 weeks

The British national and his Swiss companion are likely to be released in the few upcoming weeks following information furnished by a European country to Algeria, a high-ranking security source said. As a result, the Sahel countries have postponed the military attack scheduled against Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, for 2 weeks later, while maintaining their military forces stationing across these regions and carrying on land patrols and air reconnaissance.

According to the same source, the decision to postpone this large-scale military operation is because of the progress of negotiations reached between the terrorist group led by the notorious terrorist named Yahia Djouadi, and nicknamed Abou Amar, and mediators from Mali, as well as some Salafists living in Europe.
Some European countries made pressures on the countries engaged in this military operation, obliging them to end the intensified air and land raids, in view of saving the lives of the aforementioned hostages. He further pointed out that a European country, - he did not unveil, - has informed Algeria that a progress has been reached in the negotiations with the kidnappers, without making important concessions.

Consequently, the release of the 2 hostages is expected during the next few weeks, or later in July, if the negotiations will be maintained, concluded the same source.

http://www.elkhabar.com/quotidienFrEn/? ... 36&idc=114
No estaría mal destacar asesores militares y policiales a Argelia para apoyar en el planteamiento de las Operaciones (como componente visible, el no visible debería estar metido en el ajo desde hace tiempo)
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