Tag Archives: al-Qaeda

An unholy alliance

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Economist

Tuareg rebels and al-Qaeda unite to create a fierce new state in the north

GUNFIRE pierced the night quiet. For weeks, inhabitants of the ancient desert towns of Gao and Timbuktu had feared that rival Tuareg rebels would clash. Between January and March they had together waged a devastatingly effective campaign against Mali’s army, sending its last troops packing in early April and proclaiming an independent state called Azawad. But the rivalry then flared, and lawlessness and factionalism have been rife since.

Machinegun bursts on May 26th sent residents scurrying for cover. But the shooting turned out to be celebratory. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, a secular group known by its French initials, MNLA, had cut a deal with Islamic fundamentalists from a locally dominant lot called Ansar Eddine. The pair agreed to join forces and set up a transitional government. Peace would follow.

Yet residents still have reason to be scared. Ansar Eddine has become almost indistinguishable from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). This is the closest to government that al-Qaeda, under any guise, has ever come. Though the nomadic Tuareg and other ethnic groups of northern Mali number only 1.3m people, the area they now control is as big as France. Continue reading →

Is Al-Qaeda Beefing Up Its Presence in Mali?

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

Ali Cissé, 30, a shopkeeper, couldn’t contain his curiosity when a new wave of gunmen rolled into town. Outside the governor’s compound in downtown Gao — a dusty administrative center of adobe architecture and open skies — he saw a fleet of armored vehicles with foreign fighters standing guard. “I saw [militants] from Niger, Pakistan, Algeria, Mauritania [and] Tunisia,” Cissé tells TIME by phone from northern Mali. “I identified them by their accents because they like approaching people… to try to win their [sympathy].” Whatever their provenance, the fighters had one thing in common: they rode with Ansar Eddine, a group at times almost indistinguishable from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the regional terror franchise.

Ever since a motley combination of Tuareg separatists and Islamic supremacists swept through northern Mali in a blaze of gunfire, an echo-chamber of rumor, gossip and misinformation has supplanted hard facts, and it’s worth treating all information — however credible the source — with caution. But it isn’t just Cissé claiming that foreign Islamic militants are flocking to this latest of troublespots. In the fabled waystation of Timbuktu, 300 miles upriver from Gao, a tour guide called Buba tells TIME that “Algerian nationals” are prevalent among the armed groups controlling the city. Taken with other reported sighting of foreign Islamist supremacists arriving in northern Mali, it’s one of a number of signs that will have al-Qaeda watchers wondering whether northern Mali is becoming a new jihadist playground — even as the U.S. and its allies move against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and a relentless drone campaign batters the badlands of Pakistan’s Northwest frontier.

If Cissé kept a diary, it would provide a troubling record of the power struggle between secular Tuareg separatists and a host of religiously-inspired militants seeking to impose Shar’ia across the region. The day after Cissé saw holy warriors in downtown Gao, the 30-year-old shopkeeper says he picked his way through a military base that until recently housed U.S. special forces training the Malian army — but has now been laid waste by the various armed groups that have seized northern Mali. The next day, protesters took to the streets of Gao chanting, “Down with Ansar Eddine and the MNLA” — the initials of the secular group vying with the Islamists for supremacy and blamed for the prevailing lawlessness. On Wednesday, May 16, Cissé says that “sporadic gunfire” continued as the Islamists and gunmen from the MNLA dispersed crowds by firing over them. Continue reading →

Escape from Timbuktu: Foreigners Flee as Mali’s Rebels Declare Independence

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

A handout picture released by Azawad National Liberation Movement (MLNA) on April 2, 2012 and taken in February 2012 reportedly shows MNLA fighters gathering in an undisclosed location in Mali. AFP / GETTY IMAGES

TIME.com

Caked in dust and bristling with weaponry, the Tuareg rebels smiled at Neil Whitehead and Diane English. “It’s okay, we’re here for your protection,” one of the veiled warriors grinned at the nervous couple. Caught up in the middle of a war after Tuareg separatists advanced hundreds of miles in a matter of hours, the hotel-owners had tried twice already to leave their adopted home of Timbuktu. At first, retreating army columns had blocked their way. Then, when the road eventually cleared, English and Whitehead ran straight into a firefight. “There were guns going off all around us and tracer going past the cab windows, and we thought, ‘This isn’t good’,” English says, with a flash of understatement.

Yet the real threat came not from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (known by its French acronym, MLNA)—the 1,000 or so secular Tuareg separatists who Friday declared independence—but Islamist militants and al-Qaeda emirs busy hijacking their campaign. As Timbuktu fell, French diplomats brokered a deal to spirit English, Whitehead, their “leggy, Saharan desert dog” Lily, and a French citizen also trapped in the fabled city to safety. Wearing turbans to disguise themselves and taking only those belongings they could carry, the fugitives piled into Tuareg pickups—and then camped and drove, camped and drove, “belting through the desert hell for leather,” English says.  The rebels “really were fantastic… From the time we put ourselves in their hands… although I knew we weren’t yet safe, I wasn’t really concerned.”

(READ: Gaddafi’s Gift to Mali: The Tuareg Seize Timbuktu.)

Two days and 850 miles of hard driving later, they arrived in Mauritania’s seaside capital of Nouakchott—dusty, tired, rattled—and relieved. “Having a shower and a change of clothes was an absolute luxury,” says English. Yet happy ending aside, the flight through the desert underscores one of the most unsettling aspects of Mali’s Tuareg revolt: how al-Qaeda’s regional franchise has been able to exploit the instability in northern Mali much more, and much faster, than almost anyone anticipated. The first worrying signs emerged Monday with reports that Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the Algerian-born leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had been spotted in Timbuktu, alongside two other prominent AQIM commanders, Abou Zeid and Yahya Abou al-Hammam. “It’s extremely difficult to evaluate the claims and reports coming out of Timbuktu,” says to Andrew Lebovich, an analyst with the Navanti Group who focuses on Sahelian issues. But “multiple sources cite eyewitnesses who say they saw one or several AQIM leaders.” As civilians fleeing Timbuktu impart fresh accounts of what is happening in the desert city, the number of claims is growing steadily. Continue reading →

Food stocks low, fuel hard to find: Mali’s misfortunes worsen as al-Qaeda arrives

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Times

Mali’s two-week-old junta rejected international calls to relinquish power yesterday as sanctions intended to force the new regime to step down began to bite and Islamists cemented their grip in the country’s turbulent north.

In his first comments since the embargo was imposed, the coup leader, Captain Amadou Sanogo, warned that the ousted president, Amadou Toumani Toure, could be charged with “high treason and financial wrongdoing”. He announced that a meeting to discuss Mali’s future would take place tomorrow.

Amid fears that Islamic extremists were taking advantage of the political upheaval, three of al-Qaeda’s leaders were said to have headed to the ancient trading city of Timbuktu, where Sharia was being imposed and women were being told to wear veils. Continue reading →

The Fearsome Tuareg Uprising in Mali: Less Monolithic than Meets the Eye

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

 

Tuareg rebels stand near a truck in Mali on March 19, 2012. DPA / LANDOV

TIME.com

The allegedly al-Qaeda-linked faction of the Tuareg rebellion in troubled Mali seems more of an opportunistic break than a real extension of the terror group

Somewhere close to the Algerian border a delegation of Tuareg notables hurried through the desert for a summit. It was mid-March and there was dissension among them. One of their own, a renegade desert warrior called Iyad ag Ghali, had just thrown the Tuaregs’ meticulously plotted rebellion against the Malian government into jeopardy. In proclamations appearing on YouTube, ag Ghali’s spokesman had done everything that the committee behind the two-month-old uprising by Tuareg rebels wanted to avoid. “It is our obligation to fight for the application of Shar’ia in Mali,” the spokesman said. The poisonous phrase, seized eagerly by a Malian government smarting from military defeat, undid months of careful political messaging. Now everyone would think the Tuareg were in bed with al-Qaeda.

How the meeting between the Tuareg notables and the soft-spoken but inscrutable ag Ghali played out is known only to a handful of people. But within hours the rebel Mouvement National pour la Liberacion de l’Azawad (MNLA) broke publicly with ag Ghali, branding him a “criminal” whose efforts “to establish a theocratic regime” were anathema “to the foundations of our culture and civilization.” As the mud flew, ag Ghali struck back, retorting that his Ansar Eddine group (the name means “defenders of the faith”) was the new power in northern Mali. The war of words continued on March 30 as both groups claimed to have taken the strategically important town Kidal, a regional capital of 40,000 people, after days of fighting. “The rebels have been in the town since 11 o’clock. They almost have complete control,” one inhabitant told TIME by phone. “They are all armed in pickup vehicles,” another resident said. “Women uttered cries of joy to greet them at the airport.” With disarray in Bamako, following last week’s military coup, the Tuareg — secular or not — have taken their biggest prize to date and are already attacking the even larger town of Gao, 200 miles to the south.

MORE: Un-Welcoming the Presidents: The Mali Junta Digs In

The vitriolic falling out between ag Ghali and the MNLA goes some way to illustrating the complicated tapestry of interests and tensions within the Tuareg rebellion, a topic that swam into focus first after weaponry from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s looted arsenals flooded into the Sahara last year. With thousands of expatriate Tuaregs who worked for Gaddafi’s military forced to flee Libya amid the revolutionary chaos, much of the hardware is thought to have made its way to northern Mali. Desolate and unpoliceable, this swathe of desert and rocky scrub is also home to the regional terror franchise, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. That combination set alarm bells ringing. What, exactly, was the relationship between Tuareg fighters, with access to large quantities of heavy weaponry, and AQIM? Continue reading →

First, Take Nuristan: The Taliban’s New Afghan Plan

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

Time.com

Historically, Nuristan province has been key to power in Afghanistan, and the militants and their non-Afghan allies are slowly taking control there

Every morning at 8, Maulawi Zahir heads into Waygal district center, a remote mountain village of stone houses stacked almost vertically up granite slopes. As the undeniable man in charge of the Afghan village, the Taliban leader is there to hear and settle disputes. But despite his group’s ascendancy, he struggles to burnish his credentials among his constituents, even in an area where loathing for NATO and the Afghan government runs deep. “People aren’t happy, but they pretend to be,” says one local trader. “They dislike the Taliban as much as they dislike government.”

Zahir’s attempt at daily dispute resolution is important in one respect: for the first time in almost a decade the Taliban are administering an Afghan district unmolested. In fact, Waygal has been almost completely abandoned by NATO for the past three years. For the insurgents — and their non-Afghan militant allies from Pakistan and Arabic-speaking countries — it is the most visible step in a longer term strategy to turn Nuristan, itself virtually given up by the alliance since 2009, into a militant hub and a staging post for attacks on strategic targets, including the capital, Kabul. Continue reading →

Al-Qa’ida glossy advises women to cover up and marry a martyr

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Independent

Not content with launching an English-language magazine that debuted with a feature called “How to make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom”, al Qa’ida’s media wing has followed up with a magazine for women, mixing beauty tips with lessons in jihad.

The 31-page glossy, Al-Shamikha, which translates loosely as “The Majestic Woman”, features a niqab-clad woman posing with a sub-machine gun on its cover. Continue reading →