Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Spreading Fire or Dying Flame?

This month has brought Algerian Islamist terrorists back into the news. The group known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) announced it had executed a British hostage, Edwin Dyer, in the depths of the Sahara Desert, while its forces in the north of Algeria carried out successful attacks on security forces. In the most recent incident twenty-four policemen were killed in an ambush a hundred miles east of the capital Algiers.

According to the Algerian government, these incidents are just the last desperate acts of an Islamist terrorist group on the verge of collapse. Yet Western anti-terrorist experts are increasingly concerned about what they see as the spread of AQIM's influence across northern and western Africa and the possibility that its cells among the North African diaspora population of western Europe may carry out terrorist attacks in that region. So is AQIM a dying flame as the Algerian authorities claim, or is it a spreading fire as Western intelligence experts fear?

AQIM has its origins in the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, which broke out after the secularist government and army cancelled national elections in 1992 when it seemed they might be won by an Islamist party. The principal Islamist insurgents came from the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), but in 1998 a faction calling itself the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) broke away from GIA in a dispute over tactics. By the year 2000 the counter-terrorist efforts of the Algerian government and its offers of amnesty to surrendering fighters had much reduced the activities of GIA. Soon the GSPC replaced it as the leading Islamist terror group in Algeria.

Although the GSPC was capable of carrying out headline-grabbing operations such as its kidnapping of thirty-two European tourists in the Algerian Sahara in February 2003 (later released in return for a large ransom), its main efforts against the Algerian government seemed to be faltering. In order to raise its profile and strengthen its wider international terrorist links, the GSPC began to negotiate with Al Qaeda for recognition, affiliation and support.

Finally, in September 2006, Al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, announced its approval of a link with the GSPC, which now renamed itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Algerian authorities claimed the name change was just a last-ditch attempt to revitalize a declining domestic insurgency, but AQIM soon carried out some significant attacks within the country, introducing the Al Qaeda tactic of suicide bombings to Algeria for the first time. These attacks culminated in co-ordinated suicide bombings in Algiers in December 2007 which killed thirty-seven people, including seventeen United Nations employees.

As well as intensifying its struggle within Algeria, AQIM has also sought to spread Islamist terrorist operations across neighbouring countries. Efforts in Morocco, Tunisia and Libya have had little success, but the weaker states of Mauritania, Mali and Niger in the Sahara have proved more fertile ground for AQIM's operations. AQIM has forged links with local insurgent groups in those countries, so that the insurgents often kidnap Westerners and sell them on to AQIM for use as hostages.

More worrying for Western intelligence services have been AQIM's efforts to extend its terrorist cell network in western Europe and take over the remains of GIA's support organization in countries such as Spain and France. So far AQIM has failed to carry out any terrorist attacks in western Europe, with a number of its cells being identified and broken up by anti-terrorist police, but new cells seem to be forming all the time. One day they may carry out successful attacks.

The Algerian government claims terrorist activities are declining in that country, which may be true in comparison with the bloodshed of the 1990s civil war, but attacks persist. In 2008 there were an estimated 85 significant bombings in Algeria, with 639 people (409 suspected militants, 158 security personnel, and 72 civilians) killed in terrorist-related incidents. This year there have been 64 bombings from January to April alone, with 247 people (167 suspected militants, 61 security personnel, and 19 civilians) killed in terrorist-related violence in that period. The Algerian government claims AQIM only has a few hundred active fighters left. If so, they still seem able to have a significant domestic impact.

In late 2008 and early 2009 local insurgents in Niger seized two Canadian diplomats on a UN mission and four European tourists. They were later sold to AQIM forces based in the desert areas of southern Algeria and northern Mali. In April the Canadian diplomats and two of the European hostages were released. Despite Canadian government claims to the contrary, ransoms were almost certainly paid to AQIM. Of the remaining European hostages, the British man is said to have been beheaded at the start of this month, allegedly because the British government refused to negotiate with the terrorists, and a Swiss person is still being held. Mali has now been forced to take action, launching attacks on a supposed AQIM base in the country, but no long-lasting damage seems to have been done to the terrorist group.

AQIM, currently led by Abdelmalek Droukdel, seems likely to continue its operations in Algeria and in the weaker Sahara states in the immediate future despite the best efforts of the Algerian government and of the Sahara states who are now getting support from the USA's new Africa Command. Whether AQIM will mount terrorist attacks in western Europe is less certain. AQIM does not seem to be a dying flame, but how far its renewed fire will spread only time will tell.