WASHINGTON — The State Department warned Wednesday that a new terrorist
group linked to an Algerian militant has emerged as “the greatest
near-term threat to U.S. and Western interests” in the Sahel region of
Africa. The State Department’s move underscored the resilience of the
militant factions and their ability to forge new terrorist alliances,
even in the face of Western pressure.
“We are seeing a dangerous mutation of the threat,” said Bruce Hoffman,
an expert on terrorism at Georgetown University. “Splinters can become
even more consequential than their parent organization.”
The source of much of the concern is Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian
militant who has long been a notorious figure in the Sahel region — a
vast area on the southern flank of the Sahara that stretches from
Senegal to Chad — and who appears to have become more dangerous even as
his ties to Al Qaeda seem to have become more tenuous. Known as Laaouar,
or the one-eyed, after losing an eye to shrapnel, Mr. Belmokhtar fought
against a Soviet-installed government in Afghanistan.
After returning to Algeria
in the 1990s, he joined a militant Algerian group and took refuge in
Mali, where he was involved in smuggling and kidnapping for ransom,
including the abduction of a Canadian diplomat in 2008.
Mr. Belmokhtar became a leading figure in Al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb, or A.Q.I.M., the Qaeda affiliate in North Africa.
But in 2012, he split with the group to lead the Al Mulathameen
Battalion, which was officially designated as a foreign terrorist
organization by the State Department on Wednesday.
“The finding reflects the fact that the terrorist groups in the region
are in flux, although certain individuals remain constant,” said Michael
R. Shurkin, a former C.I.A. analyst who is now at the RAND Corporation.
Since breaking with the Qaeda affiliate, Mr. Belmokhtar has shown a
penchant for carrying out headline-grabbing attacks against Western
interests.
“He is a more adventurous, perhaps even more reckless operator than the
A.Q.I.M. leadership has shown itself to be,” said Daniel Benjamin, the
former senior counterterrorism official at the State Department who is
now a scholar at Dartmouth College. “And that translates into a threat.”
In January, Mr. Belmokhtar led the attack on a gas plant in Algeria that
resulted in the death of 38 civilians, including three Americans. Four months later,
his group joined with a Western African terrorist faction — the
Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa — to carry out attacks in
Niger that killed at least 20 people, the State Department said.
In August, Mr. Belmokhtar’s faction and the West African extremists
announced that they were joining to establish yet another group: Al
Murabitoun.
The new terrorist group, a State Department official said, “concerns us more than any in the region.”
Even before joining with Mr. Belmokhtar’s organization, the West African
group was a concern in its own right: It participated in the push
toward Bamako, Mali’s capital, which led to the French intervention in
January.
Designating Mr. Belmokhtar’s faction as a foreign terrorist group allows
the United States to take legal action against it, such as arresting
individuals in the United States who provide “material support” and
seizing assets in American-based banks. It does not authorize military
action, but it is a useful form of diplomatic pressure on other nations
to take steps to crack down on the group and its supporters.
The Obama administration has not always seemed to be of one mind
on how aggressively to pursue Mr. Belmokhtar, especially when it comes
to considering military action or providing intelligence to Algeria or
other nations that would enable them to take such action.
Mr. Belmokhtar’s precise whereabouts is not known, though he and his
group are believed to operate in Libya, southern Algeria and northern
Mali.
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