Al Qaeda’s new reality in Africa
Attacks in the Ivory Coast by affiliates have little to do with competition with Daesh
When an Al Qaeda affiliate makes things go boom, stoking global fear isn’t always the main goal, however much the horrible headlines suggest otherwise.
Nor is simple competition — Al Qaeda’s obsession with winning back jihadist supremacy from the 2.0 upstarts of Daesh, also referred to as ISIS and ISIL — always driving the attacks.
Too bad, right? Can’t we just think of Al Qaeda versus Daesh as we do the Leafs versus the Habs? Simple one-upmanship, and nothing more? Sorry, no. Not if we really want to understand and counter the loose and often very regional affiliations and intrigue behind the headlines.
This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa, where “specific local and regional dynamics” are “crucial” to understanding the crisis, as the International Crisis Group noted Monday in a nuanced special report on the evolving jihadist landscape.
None of this in any way blunts the unprecedented shock that visited the Ivory Coast on Sunday, when gunmen acting in the name of Al Qaeda’s North African branch quaffed beer at a beachside bar before unleashing a fusillade of bullets throughout the resort town of Grand Bassam.
It was the softest of targets, a weekend retreat 40 kilometres from the sweltering capital, Abidjan. And when the dust settled, at least 18 people were dead, including all three gunmen. It was a surprise, insofar as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had never before struck the comparatively stable and prosperous Ivory Coast, let alone any other destination so far beyond its traditional desert base. But not a huge surprise — security forces were braced for expanding AQIM strikes in West Africa after recent attacks in Mali and Burkina Faso.
Some of the confusion cleared Monday when AQIM claimed responsibility in a statement that enu- merated purely regional fury without so much as a hint of Daesh-envy. Ivory Coast, it said, came under attack because of the country’s ties to the ongoing French military campaign in Mali, including the recent handover of seven prisoners. “We repeat our call to all countries involved in the French invasion of Mali to withdraw from this satanic alliance.” The AQIM statement also confirmed the collaborative involvement of Al Mourabitoun, a breakaway group founded after French soldiers surged into Mali to scatter Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
AQIM’s acknowledgement of collaboration with Al Mourabitoun, in turn, is awakening intrigue over the whereabouts of the breakaway group’s oft-targeted founder, Mokhtar Belmokhtar. A one-eyed veteran of the training camps of Afghanistan, the notorious Algerian warlord had famously fallen out with Al Qaeda’s African leaders over a litany of perceived slights, including his failure to file timely expense reports. Belmokhtar, known by his nom de guerre Abu Khaled, for years led a highly lucrative crime syndicate ranging from kidnapping to the smuggling of drugs, weapons and people under a business model that owed more to the sensibilities of Mexican drug-lord Joaquin (El Cha- po) Guzman than Osama bin Laden. His outright departure from AQIM left the Al Qaeda affiliate’s status in doubt.
Belmokhtar is alleged to have died numerous deaths, most recently last June, during a U.S. airstrike that targeted a meeting of extremists in the Libyan town of Ajdabiya. But Al Mourabitoun promptly denied its founder’s demise and western intelligence sources quietly acknowledge that without DNA evidence they are unable to say.
Now that Al Mourabitoun has resumed its alliance with AQIM, the intrigue continues anew, with analysts divided over whether the regrouping signals a change of heart by Belmokhtar or instead should be taken as evidence he is out of the picture altogether.
Either way, the Ivory Coast attack, the third major collaborative AQIM/ Al Mourabitoun operation in four months, signals a daunting resilience for fighters that barely two years ago were thought to have been scattered to near oblivion by the French-led campaign in Mali. AQIM has added other affiliates of late, including the Mali-based Macina Liberation Front, itself though to be a proxy of the Ansar Dine Islamist movement. Coupled with its other regional rivals, including Boko Haramin north- ern Nigeria and the expanding clusters of Daesh-held territory in Libya, Al Qaeda’s deeper reach into Africa adds a fresh layer of worry to multiple fledgling governments already struggling to provide anything approximating law and order.
Among the untouched nations in the neighbourhood, some analysts fear foremost for Senegal, which recently detained 500 people in a counterterror crackdown.
Two weeks ago, Ryan Cummings, director of the African security firm SignalRisk, offered his own grim regional survey of the AQIM threat, pointing to Senegal as the softest target among the highly vulnerable top three, including Ivory Coast and Guinea. He added a warning of the double-edge sword of western patronage stepping in to carry the fight in the face of “corruption, weak political institutions and oppressive governance” in the region. “Foreign intervention always runs the risk of aiding extremist groups in their recruitment among communities disenchanted with the faux democracy exported and endorsed across the continent,” wrote Cummings.
“Consequently, violence by AQIM and its counterparts is set to remain a feature of the security landscape in North and West Africa for the foreseeable future.”