Islamic Rebels Gain Strength in the Sahara

Moving South From Algeria, al Qaeda-Affiliated Insurgents Find Support Among Locals in Mauritania, Mali and Niger

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania -- Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels are spreading far beyond their original battleground in Algeria and increasingly threatening Africa's Sahara belt, scaring away investors and tourists as they undercut the region's fragile economies.

Dozens of security personnel, as well as an American aid worker and a British tourist, were killed by militants in several attacks in the region this summer alone. The attacks -- which prompted this year's lucrative Paris-Dakar car race to relocate to South America -- have become more frequent and brazen. Recent hits occurred not just in the remote desert but also in Mali's tourist magnet Timbuktu and in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where a suicide bomber attacked the French Embassy last weekend.

Though still dominated by the veterans of Algeria's civil war, this Saharan insurgency has grown deep local roots. Armed bands roaming the desert include hundreds of recruits from Mauritania, Mali and Niger -- vast and impoverished countries that straddle the Arab world and black West Africa, and that relied on the now-collapsed tourism industry as the key source of foreign exchange.

"What had started out as an Algerian problem is now engulfing Mali and Mauritania. They are the weak link," says Zakaria Ould Ahmed Salem, a specialist on political Islam at the University of Nouakchott.

An Islamist insurgency that cost 200,000 lives erupted in Algeria 18 years ago, after that country's secular regime annulled the second round of elections that the Islamists were poised to win. But it is only in the past few years, as Algerian security forces contained the violence at home, that the rebels -- who seek to create an Islamic state encompassing North Africa -- began mounting operations in neighboring Saharan countries that had been unscathed by international terrorism.

Underlining its wider ambitions, the main Algerian insurgent movement, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, re-branded itself in 2007 as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. Actual operational links between AQIM militants in the Sahara and traditional al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan or Afghanistan are tenuous, if they exist at all, Western officials say.

But the group's new name has made it easier to find money and recruits for the cause outside Algeria. "Someone like Bin Laden is considered a hero here," explains Mohamed Fall Ould Oumere, publisher of La Tribune newsweekly in Nouakchott.

Mauritania, where most people speak Arabic and watch satellite TV chains like Al-Jazeera, is a particularly fertile ground for AQIM's growth, and accounts for a growing share of the movement's cadres, Western diplomats say. In Mali, Niger and Chad, the bulk of AQIM recruits also come from Arab-speaking communities, which in these countries are outnumbered by black African majorities.

AQIM is trying to spread south, "aiming to attract the young Muslims of the region -- white ones and black ones," says Isselmou Ould Moustafa, a specialist on AQIM who interviewed many of the group's members for his Mauritanian publication, Tahalil Hebdo.

Security officials in Nigeria recently claimed that AQIM trained in Algeria some members of Boko Haram, the Islamist sect whose armed uprising cost several hundred lives in northern Nigeria last month. According to some experts on AQIM, there is also evidence of contacts between the Saharan insurgents and the Shabaab, the radical Islamist militia controlling a chunk of Somalia. "It's an arc of fire," says Mr. Oumere.

All the governments in the region say they are fighting back. But the area's political instability and frequent bickering between neighboring countries have long made it easy for Islamist rebels to roam the Sahara, obtaining sanctuary and help from local tribes. Mali and Mauritania both have strained relations with Algeria. Planned regional summits to tackle the cross-border terrorism problem have been repeatedly postponed.

A military coup in Mauritania last year complicated the situation: The U.S. reacted to the overthrowing of Mauritania's democratically elected president by reducing military cooperation with the country and pulling out a reconnaissance plane that flew regular sorties over the Sahara to search for insurgents. Cooperation is likely to be restored now that Mauritania has held a democratic election last month.

Government officials here say that, without outside help, Saharan countries have little chance of defeating AQIM. "This is a zone that can't be controlled. We don't know who's out there in the vast desert and what are they doing," says Mohamed Ould Rzeizim, who served until this week as Mauritania's minister of interior.

To finance its campaign, AQIM is smuggling Europe-bound cigarettes, drugs and illegal immigrants through the desert, Mauritanian and Western officials say. Depots of untaxed cigarettes, often brought in by ship from South America, dot the desert along Mauritania's porous northern borders.

An equally important source of revenue for AQIM is ransom money -- estimated at tens of millions of dollars -- paid by European governments for the freedom of European tourists kidnapped in separate attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali and Niger. The hostages were usually transported across the Sahara to AQIM's bases in lawless northern Mali, where local officials helped negotiate the ransom collection and the tourists' release.

Mali's role as a sanctuary for AQIM has long infuriated Algeria and the U.S. The country appears to be taking a harder line after the Islamist rebels -- who refrained from killing their hostages in the past -- announced in June that they executed their British captive, Edwin Dyer.

A few days after the killing of Mr. Dyer, suspected militants also gunned down in Timbuktu the regional chief of Malian intelligence, Lt. Col. Lamina Ould Bou. The colonel, an ethnic Arab and former Islamist rebel, had played a crucial role in Mali's efforts against AQIM. According to Malian government accounts and al Qaeda Internet postings, armed clashes in the region in following weeks killed dozens of Malian troops and Islamist guerrillas.

"We are now engaged in a total struggle against al Qaeda," Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré declared last month.

The Saharan rebels have so far targeted only foreigners and security forces, sparing civilian targets like restaurants and hotels. In Algeria, Pakistan and Iraq, by contrast, al Qaeda-affiliated militants showed no concern about killing large numbers of Muslim civilians.

"These youngsters are not yet ready to carry out blind attacks and to explode car bombs, Algerian-style. They have not yet completely broken with the Mauritanian society," says Mr. Moustafa, the AQIM expert. But, he cautions, bloodier attacks are likely to happen soon: "They have bad teachers. Their future targets will be Mauritanian."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Suicide Blast Wounds 2 at Embassy in Mauritania

By ADAM NOSSITER

DAKAR, Senegal — A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the French Embassy in Mauritania’s capital on Saturday night, slightly wounding two embassy security guards who were jogging near the walls.

“Someone approached them and blew himself up,” a spokesman for the French Embassy, Marc Flattot, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Nouakchott.

“It wasn’t a big explosion,” he said.

“There were a number of light wounds. They were shocked,” he said of the security guards, who were hospitalized for observation.

“No doubt they had been spotted,” Mr. Flattot said.

Mauritania is a large Islamic country of mostly desert that has suffered a number of attacks attributed to a North African militant group affiliated with Al Qaeda, including the killing of an American in June.

But there had not been a suicide bombing on record, and analysts and diplomats in Nouakchott considered Saturday’s attack an escalation of terrorist activities in a land whose vast, unpatrolled northern frontiers have become a cause of concern to counterterrorism officials.

“They’re clearly becoming more active,” a Western diplomat in Nouakchott said of the militant group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. “It’s the first time we’ve seen them do it here.”

The diplomat cautioned, though, that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had previously shown its ability to bring militants into Mauritania from neighboring Mali.

Now, the diplomat said, “It’s perhaps more focused.”

On Saturday night, a Mauritanian Web site said to be close to the government, the Agence Nouakchott d’Information, reported that the suicide bomber was a Mauritanian.

It said the bomber cried “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” before blowing himself up as he approached the two Frenchmen.

The police told Agence France-Presse that the suspect was a jihadist who had been sought by security officials.

No responsibility for the bombing was claimed Saturday night.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb previously declared itself responsible for the shooting of the American, Christopher Leggett, six weeks ago on a street in Nouakchott. Saturday’s attack, unlike the shooting, took place in the heart of the capital’s diplomatic and upper-end residential district, Tevragh Zeina.

Three Mauritanians were charged with murder last week in Mr. Leggett’s death; one was wearing an explosives belt that did not detonate when he was arrested in July.

Three others, accused of close ties to Al Qaeda, are in custody in the killing of four French tourists in Mauritania in 2007.

Also in July, one of the Qaeda branch’s leaders threatened war against France over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s declarations against the burqa, the head-to-toe covering worn by some Muslim women.

France is the former colonial power in Mauritania and provides millions of dollars in aid each year.

Earlier last week, Mauritania’s newly elected president, the former coup leader and general Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, declared at his inauguration that he would “spare no effort in the fight against terrorism and its causes.”

Mauritania is considered to be a country of moderate Islam; the Islamist candidate in the recent presidential elections got little support.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb recently carried out attacks in the desert in the neighboring country of Mali, including an encounter with a Malian Army patrol and the killing of a senior Malian Army officer in his home.

“This is the logical follow-up to the recent encounters in the north of Mali,” said Isselmou Ould Moustapha, the editor of Tahalil Hebdo, a newspaper in Nouakchott.

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris.