Jihadists’ Surge in North Africa Reveals Grim Side of Arab Spring
By ROBERT F. WORTH / The New York Times
WASHINGTON — As the uprising closed in around him, the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi warned that if he fell, chaos and holy war would overtake North Africa. “Bin Laden’s people would come to impose ransoms by land and sea,” he told reporters. “We will go back to the time of Redbeard, of pirates, of Ottomans imposing ransoms on boats.”
In recent days, that unhinged prophecy has acquired a grim new currency. In Mali, French paratroopers arrived this month to battle an advancing force of jihadi fighters who already control an area twice the size of Germany. In Algeria, a one-eyed Islamist bandit organized the brazen takeover of an international gas facility, taking hostages that included more than 40 Americans and Europeans.
Coming just four months after an American ambassador was killed by jihadists in Libya, those assaults have contributed to a sense that North Africa — long a dormant backwater for Al Qaeda — is turning into another zone of dangerous instability, much like Syria, site of an increasingly bloody civil war. The mayhem in this vast desert region has many roots, but it is also a sobering reminder that the euphoric toppling of dictators in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt has come at a price.
“It’s one of the darker sides of the Arab uprisings,” said Robert Malley, the Middle East and North Africa director at the International Crisis Group. “Their peaceful nature may have damaged Al Qaeda and its allies ideologically, but logistically, in terms of the new porousness of borders, the expansion of ungoverned areas, the proliferation of weapons, the disorganization of police and security services in all these countries — it’s been a real boon to jihadists.”
The crisis in Mali is not likely to end soon, with the militants ensconcing themselves among local people and digging fortifications. It could also test the fragile new governments of Libya and its neighbors, in a region where any Western military intervention arouses bitter colonial memories and provides a rallying cry for Islamists.
And it comes as world powers struggle with civil war in Syria, where another Arab autocrat is warning about the furies that could be unleashed if he falls.
Even as Obama administration officials vowed to hunt down the hostage-takers in Algeria, they faced the added challenge of a dauntingly complex jihadist landscape across North Africa that belies the easy label of “Al Qaeda,” with multiple factions operating among overlapping ethnic groups, clans and criminal networks.
Efforts to identify and punish those responsible for the attack in Benghazi, Libya, where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed in September, have bogged down amid similar confusion. The independent review panel investigating the Benghazi attack faulted American spy agencies as failing to understand the region’s “many militias, which are constantly dissolving, splitting apart and reforming.”
Although there have been hints of cross-border alliances among the militants, such links appear to be fleeting. And their targets are often those of opportunity, as they appear to have been in Benghazi and at the gas facility in Algeria.
In the longer term, the Obama administration and many analysts are divided about what kind of threat the explosion of Islamist militancy across North Africa poses to the United States. Some have called for a more active American role, noting that the hostage-taking in Algeria demonstrates how hard it can be to avoid entanglement.
Others warn against too muscular a response. “It puts a transnational framework on top of what is fundamentally a set of local concerns, and we risk making ourselves more of an enemy than we would otherwise be,” said Paul R. Pillar of Georgetown University, a former C.I.A. analyst.
In a sense, both the hostage crisis in Algeria and the battle raging in Mali are consequences of the fall of Colonel Qaddafi in 2011. Like other strongmen in the region, Colonel Qaddafi had mostly kept in check his country’s various ethnic and tribal factions, either by brutally suppressing them or by co-opting them to fight for his government. He acted as a lid, keeping volatile elements repressed. Once that lid was removed, and the borders that had been enforced by powerful governments became more porous, there was greater freedom for various groups — whether rebels, jihadists or criminals — to join up and make common cause.
In Mali, for instance, there are the Tuaregs, a nomadic people ethnically distinct both from Arabs, who make up the nations to the north, and the Africans who inhabit southern Mali and control the national government. They fought for Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, then streamed back across the border after his fall, banding together with Islamist groups to form a far more formidable fighting force. They brought with them heavy weapons and a new determination to overthrow the Malian government, which they had battled off and on for decades in a largely secular struggle for greater autonomy.
Even the Algeria gas field attack — which took place near the Libyan border, and may have involved Libyan fighters — reflects the chaos that has prevailed in Libya for the past two years.
Yet Colonel Qaddafi’s fall was only the tipping point, some analysts say, in a region where chaos has been on the rise for years, and men who fight under the banner of jihad have built up enormous reserves of cash through smuggling and other criminal activities. If the rhetoric of the Islamic militants now fighting across North Africa is about holy war, the reality is often closer to a battle among competing gangsters in a region where government authority has long been paper-thin.
Among those figures, two names stand out: Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the warlord who led the attack on the Algerian gas field, and Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, a leader of Al Qaeda’s North African branch.
“The driving force behind jihadism in the Sahara region is the competition between Abu Zeid and Belmokhtar,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a Middle East analyst at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris.
Mr. Belmokhtar has generated millions of dollars for the Qaeda group through the kidnapping of Westerners and the smuggling of tobacco, which earned him one of his nicknames, “Mr. Marlboro.” But Mr. Belmokhtar bridles under authority, and last year his rival forced him out of the organization, Mr. Filiu said.
“Belmokhtar has now retaliated by organizing the Algeria gas field attack, and it is a kind of masterstroke — he has proved his ability,” Mr. Filiu said.
Both men are from Algeria, a breeding ground of Islamic extremism. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as the regional branch is known, originated with Algerian Islamists who fought against their government during the bloody civil conflict of the 1990s in that country.
Algeria’s authoritarian government is now seen as a crucial intermediary by France and other Western countries in dealing with Islamist militants in North Africa. But the Algerians have shown reluctance to become too involved in a broad military campaign that could be very risky for them.
International action against the Islamist takeover in northern Mali could push the militants back into southern Algeria, where they started. That would undo years of bloody struggle by Algeria’s military forces, which largely succeeded in pushing the jihadists outside their borders.
The Algerians also have little patience with what they see as Western naïveté about the Arab spring, analysts say.
“Their attitude was, ‘Please don’t intervene in Libya or you will create another Iraq on our border,’ ” said Geoff D. Porter, an Algeria expert and founder of North Africa Risk Consulting, which advises investors in the region. “And then, ‘Please don’t intervene in Mali or you will create a mess on our other border.’ But they were dismissed as nervous Nellies, and now Algeria says to the west: ‘Goddamn it, we told you so.’ ”
Although French military forces are now fighting alongside the Malian Army, plans to retake the lawless zone of northern Mali have for the past year largely focused on training an African fighting force, and trying to peel off some of the more amenable elements among the insurgents with negotiations.
Some in Mali and the West had invested hopes in Iyad Ag Ghali, a Tuareg who leads Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, one of the main Islamist groups. Mr. Ghali, who is said to be opportunistic, was an ideological link between the hard-line Islamists of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the more secular nationalist Tuareg group, known as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad.
But so far negotiations have led nowhere, leaving the Malian authorities and their Western interlocutors with little to fall back on besides armed force.
David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo, and Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Senator McCain says – Arm the FSA or else you will see AL Nusra in the ascendency and AL Qaeda will win in the endgame.
Obama’s policy of doing nothing in Syria is the problem. Despite what the conspiracy wackos think -that is what he is doing – nothing – Obama allowed Al Qaeda to get into Syria by not backing the Syrian people and the FSA and the continuation of this policy will see Al Qaeda in power in Syria.
steven l Said:
Absolutely correct.
Will the US blink first to Iran in Syria?
Libya appears as a side show, just like Algeria!
Iran supporting 100% Assad with the assistance of comrade Putin, as long as Assad remains in power, Iran & Russia are the winners and this will embolden the Iranians to go full speed for the nukes and spread further their terrorist network.
Where does the money come from?
Comment #8 In moderation and is appropriately an moderate extremist comment or a extremist moderate?
Laura Said:
First you defeat the dictators then you defeat the Jihadists. What else could be more logical?
Also the flaw in your logic is that defeating dictators means there has to be AL Qaeda or MB that is just a plain hate-based lie or deceit? You must have a driving ha-tred to delude yourself this way. If you actually ‘listened’ to people from these countries, instead oaf shouted at them, you would know there are many many that do not support either or any of those groups and these are people you can ally with ad/or influence.
Al Qaeda (AQI) is in Syria because we were not there and still are not there enough to help The FSA and and Syrian people in their hour of need. Your strategy by means of a ha-te filled ideology is to is to create enemies and to create war where none is necessary. First wage peace , not compromise, but wage peace them wage war when necessary.
At the moment Al Nusra is not repressing anyone in Syria and as Al Nusra wins battles in Syria it is a step up for innocent people and saves their lives from Assad’s murder and ethnic cleansing. At the same time Al Nusra must not achieve power and the FSA must be backed to make sure they do not. This is the way “Kill with a borrowed knife’ can be used as a strategism.Supporting Assad is not “kill with a borrowed knife because fascism is not being killed it is being maintained.
I advise you to make friendly personal overtures to Libyan people. Even if you are rebuffed you will learn something and more importantly you will teach them something.
You cannot defeat Islamic Fascism by being hostile to Islamic people. You must offer peace to people as people and death to fascists. No country in the world, Islamic or non-Islamic will support or tolerate such an approach. Because others are evil it does not justify us to be evil. This is a suicidal strategy. You are like an angry lone gunman charging an establishment – you just end up dead.
How could your ever defeat fascism by supporting fascism as an ideology. That cannot work. Gaddafi had killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people and was on the verge of committing genocide equivalent to the holocaust. – Anyone or any Country that supports that is on the wrong side of humanity.
Laura Said:
No, you are being blind with hatred. Some terrorists which oppose the new Libyan government and are counter-revolutionary, killed (ONE or several) people in a planned attack due to poor security as the Government forces have been naturally weak after the revolution. The Libyan Government itself has hundreds already lost to Islamist Assassinations in the post-revolutionary chaos which was to be expected. . But the good thing is this helped to spur and clean up of those terror groups in which many have been killed or arrested and organizations disbanded … so Libyan Security has been strengthened.
Now doesn’t that make you happy for the Libyan people?
No? Not on the side of ‘people’ are you. ….Therein lies the rub.
You logic is the same as saying you are necessarily a member of the Hel-l’s Angles because the He-ll’s Angels are in power in America – even more so than Al Qaeda is in Libya, that is for certain.
Gaddafi had made peace with the West and had his photo taken many times with Western leaders. Gaddafi was fighting AGAINST Al Qaeda. This was unacceptable to US/NATO who waged war for many months for Al Qaeda and other Muslim terrorists in Libya against Gaddafi.
The US/NATO war against the stable country of Libya and Gaddafi enabled and empowered U.S. backed anti-Gaddafi RACIST Muslims to perpetrate satanic atrocities and genocide of blacks in Libya. Blacks were safe under Gaddafi.
I attended a street demo in Harlem, NYC to protest this evil genocide by U.S. backed, anti-Gaddafi RACIST Muslims.
US/NATO did not lift a finger to help the terrified blacks.
It is clearly American policy to destabilize countries and bring to power the most radical Muslims in country after country.
In Egypt, Obama betrayed U.S. ally, moderate Mubarak, in order to bring to power U.S. leaders’ top FAVORITES, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated goal in America is the DESTRUCTION of civilization and global Islamic conquest.
@ Max:
Benghazi certainly proves your point. Surely you are being sarcastic.
And how is that being achieved by overthrowing secular dictators and empowering al qaeda and the muslim brotherhood?
They are what they are. Savages. If one can keep the lid on the other, better. That doesn’t classify him as an ally or ‘friend’. Never lose sight of what they really are.If there ARE true friends/allies within the swamp, yes, try and help or at least encourage. But beware of resultant quagmire.
Andy Lewis Said:
No he didn’t. How can a disease contain a disease?
“William Hague, the British foreign secretary, told BBC Radio 4 this morning that the west’s intervention in Libya had “mitigated” the crisis in Mali. Hague said the spread of weapons and extremism could have been even worse if Muammar Gaddafi’s regime had survived for longer. He said:
We were involved, if you recall, in saving lives in Libya. I think, actually, if we had not been doing that, because what we did actually shortened the Libyan conflict, these problems would have been, if anything, even greater.
If the Libyan conflict had gone on for longer, there would have been an even greater flow of weapons and an even greater opportunity for extremists to take hold in Libya.
While the Libyan situation may well have contributed to what has happened in Mali, I think the action that the Western world took in Libya, if anything, mitigated that.”
Gadaffi indeed kept the lid on. So did Assad, Mubarak, Saddam, and the Shah. Anyone see a pattern here?
Criminal Gangs are more powerful in North America than Al Qaeda in Libya or Algeria. All those gangs individually are extremely wealthy and powerful, taken together they are almost as strong as a medium sized country.
So by the logic above we should turn America over to China so that the Chicoms with their ruthless murderous methods can keep the lid on criminal gangs.
That’s called the cure is worse than the disease or in fact the cure kill the patient.
It’s waging war against fascism by being fascist. The above article is advocating the ideology of fascism.
If we support Gaddafi then we should have supported Adolph and Tojo – we either oppose fascism or we support it. Libya is a success – it is now a pluralistic democracy with a Western bias – good for US!
So we should have supported a tyrant murdering millions just to save a handful of Westerners in another country with a dubious conspiracy slanted connection to Gaddafi? – sounds like fanatic hatred interfering with calm rationality.
Jihadism must be defeated as Jihadim not as anything else. Beware anyone supporting a tyrant murdering the innocent, because today he decides they are the enemy tomorrow he decides it is you or us because he has no moral or humanistic platform. Those with these reptilian ideologies can never be trusted as human beings.
If we fought the Nazis just to embrace fascism then we have not won against fascism, in fact we have let fascism devour us.
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Individual Israelis should make special efforts to befriend and make overtures to the Lybian people and the Syrian revolutionaries. That is to the people themselves – not to the political organizations It will place Israelis in the right and teach them how to wage peace. No matter how those overtures may be rejected or attempted to be subverted , if they are sincere they will make Israel and Israelis stronger, not weaker.
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It is hard for those who hate to understand this concept, but giving up hate does not make one weaker in fighting the enemy, it makes one stronger. This is the natural path for all humans to learn to grow , become stronger and survive, Let the destructive draw circles to exclude but the constructive will draw circles to include.
Most people on Israpundit need to learn the true enemy of humanity is not just Islamic Fascsim but fascism itself and that to resist all forms of fascism where ever they are at home or abroad will set all of us free.