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Al-Qaeda spreads to N Africa
08/02/2007 16:40 - (SA)
Tetouan - The Hsida Mosque stands at the edge of the slum of Jamia Mezouak, where the hillside plunges into a valley whose opposite face is peppered with gravestones.
It's a bleak scene, yet some of the jobless people inhabiting the crumbling houses nearby say they have cause for hope - faith in God and allegiance to Osama bin Laden.
Al-Qaeda's influence is spreading into the cities and deserts of North Africa. Increasingly, Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians who have known only poverty, corruption and police crackdowns are answering extremist Islam's call to remake the world - with violence if need be.
Jamia Mezouak, a dingy outer layer of the northern Moroccan city of Tetouan, has symbolised this expansion since an al-Qaeda-linked group centred around the Hsida mosque recruited two young residents for suicide bombings in Baqouba, Iraq, last October, police say.
And now al-Qaeda has an official presence next door in Algeria: The Salafist Group of Call and Combat, known as the GSPC, is calling itself "al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa".
This leaves the governments of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia caught between official allegiance to the US-led war against terrorism and grassroots extremism. And experts say it puts nearby southern Europe increasingly at risk of terror attacks.
The 43 million people in northwest Africa are mostly moderate Muslims, and largely poor - despite Algeria's oil riches and thriving tourism industries in Morocco and Tunisia.
The three nations' governments brook little dissent, and tough national security measures initially prevented al-Qaeda from establishing itself in the region.
Now all that is changing.
'A haven for terrorist groups'
"Al-Qaeda can now penetrate the Sahara and Sahel area," said Fernando Reinares, an international terrorism analyst at Madrid's Elcano Institute, referring to the wide band of sub-Saharan scrub country running from Senegal to Ethiopia.
Since al-Qaeda 's rise, security experts have worried that the Sahara's wide open spaces and porous borders make it a haven for terrorist groups, the way Afghanistan's deserts have harboured Islamic militants.
The US has responded with projects like a counter-terrorism force known as the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, which uses military training, humanitarian aid and intelligence operations to try to keep nations in that region from becoming terrorist havens.
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia are part of another US project, the Trans-Sahara Partnership, under which African countries work with US forces to prevent the spread of terrorism and receive advice and assistance from the United States.
Earlier this week, US President George W Bush announced that the Pentagon will set up a new command in Africa to oversee its operations there.
The GSPC connection is al-Qaeda 's first acknowledged presence in northwest Africa.
The Algerian group shares al-Qaeda 's ideology and international agenda. Although whittled down to a few hundred members, the GSPC still carries out regular bomb attacks in Algeria and raises funds in Europe for al-Qaeda 's operations in Iraq.
The GSPC has relations with Moroccan terrorists responsible for the 2004 Madrid bombings, said Mohamed Darif, a terrorism analyst at Morocco's Mohammedia University. Jamal Ahmidan, a suspect in the bombings who lived beside the Hsida Mosque in Tetouan, died in a suicide blast during a subsequent standoff with Spanish police in Madrid.
'A deadly shoot-out'
The GSPC is co-ordinating increasingly with jihadists around North Africa, as shown by high-profile GSPC-linked arrests and attacks recently in neighbouring countries.
In late December, Moroccan police rounded up 26 people from Jamia Mezouak and nearby towns accused of forming a GSPC-linked cell attempting to recruit fighters for the Iraq insurgency.
Last month, normally placid Tunisia was rattled by a deadly shoot-out between police and Islamist gunmen tied to the GSPC and apparently planning to attack foreign diplomats.
Meanwhile in Algeria in December, the GSPC staged a daring bomb attack on buses carrying foreign workers of an affiliate of US energy services giant Halliburton, killing an Algerian bus driver and wounding nine others.
"The GSPC has become more committed to targeting Westerners, including civilians, and to mobilising recruits for Iraq," said Reinares, adding that the group was a danger to southern Europe as well as North Africa.
Spanish police recently arrested an alleged terror recruiter working in Spain for al-Qaeda and the GSPC. Both groups have repeatedly threatened France.
North African jihadists can exploit resentment between the region's poor.
"The king and the government give us only poverty and jails," said one Jamia Mezouak resident who asked not to be named because he feared the police. He said he considered the rule of Morocco's King Mohamed VI illegitimate.
Tetouan, a jumble of whitewashed houses and Spanish colonial-style plazas, lies a stone's throw from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. It survives on smuggling, said Jamaleddine Laamarti, the local head of the Moroccan Human Rights Association.
'Only a handful become terrorists'
"There's a lot of unemployment and people struggle to get by," said Laamarti. "Many of these people are drinking their coffee on credit," he added, motioning to the evening crowds filling Tetouan's downtown cafes.
But while many North Africans are poor, only a handful become terrorists. This, plus the fact that suspects have come both from North Africa's slums and Muslim communities in comfortable Western Europe, "points to the key role played by ideological indoctrination," said Reinares.
Most North Africa jihadists follow the traditionalist current in Islam known as Salafism, which has spread across the region from the Middle East in recent decades. Salafis adhere to what they deem the pure Islam of the Prophet Muhammad's early followers, supporting Islamic government and shunning non-Islamic ways and values.
Abderrahim Mouhtad, president of the an-Naseer Association, which arrested Moroccan Salafis, said that while most Salafis are peaceful, austere Salafist thinking can end with an embrace of violent jihad as a religious duty.
For some, that means struggling to overthrow their home governments. Others are inspired to make the journey to martyrdom in the Middle East.
"It's the duty of all Muslims to fight the Americans in Iraq," said the Jamia Mezouak resident. "This is a world war."
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