Algeria - Recurring Neo-Salafi Violence.

Although the Neo-Salafi militant group in Algeria now constitutes a tiny minority, it has remained active and its suicide bombings inflict heavy casualties. Now called al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb (AQOIM), the group often targets security men as well as civilians. AQOIM was previously known as GSPC, a French acronym for Salafi Group for Predication and Combat, which also had conducted attacks against security forces and civilians.

An AQOIM bomb on Feb. 22, 2009 killed nine people and injured three in northern Algeria. The victims were security agents working at the utility Sonelgaz. The bombing occurred late on Feb. 22 in the Jijel area about 350 km east of Algiers. The attack came as AQOIM had on previous days vowed to step up bombings ahead of the April 2009 presidential election. In the previous week, AQOIM had claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of two Canadian diplomats and four Western tourists seized in Mali and Niger.

Robert Fowler, the UN envoy to Niger, and his aide Louis Guay, were abducted outside Niamey, the capital, in December 2008. The tourists - two Swiss nationals, a Briton and a German - were seized near Mali's border with Niger in January. A spokesman for AQOIM made the claim in an audio recording broadcast on the Qatar-funded pan-Arab TV network al-Jazeera late on Feb. 17, saying it would soon issue conditions for their release. Members of AQOIM have carried out a series of suicide attacks and bombings in these African countries in the past few years.

AQOIM appears to be seeking to expand the scope of its operations in the Sahelian belt of countries where sub-Saharan Africa merges with the southern fringes of the Arab world. According to Reuters, the broadcast said the AQOIM militants "reserved the right to deal with the six captives under Islamic shari'a (law)" - i.e., their lives may be at risk. Niger President Mamadou Tandja in January said investigations indicated "terrorists" had kidnapped Fowler and Guay. Reuters quoted a "senior Malian military source" as saying AQOIM was the most likely to be holding them.

AQOIM, which staged three bombings in Algeria on Aug. 19-20, 2008, killing over 60 people, has grown from a remnant of Algeria's insurgency in the 1990s. In a tape aired on Aug. 22 by al-Jazeera, an AQOIM spokesman "Salah Abu Muhammad" claimed responsibility for the 19-20 bombings and described the attacks as retaliation against security forces for their crackdown on militants, described as "Mujahedeen" (holy warriors). He said the attacks "follow the perfidious operation, where a number of young Mujahedeen have been killed". (On Aug. 19, a suicide bomber rammed a car full of explosives into a line of applicants waiting to register at a police academy, killing at least 44 in the town of Les Issers, east of Algiers. At dawn on Aug. 20, twin car bombs targeted a military HQ and a passenger bus in the neighbouring town of Bouira south-east of Algiers. The 17 killed in Bouira were employees of a Canadian firm. The tape said the attack in Bouira was done by a man named 'Abdul-Rahman Abu Zenab al-Muritani (the Mauritanian). Abu Muhammad said the attacks were in retaliation to a police sweep in Tizi-Ouzou, south-east of Algiers, where authorities said earlier they killed a dozen AQOIM militants hiding in the hills. He said those killed in Tizi-Ouzou were in a car "packed with explosives" set off by remote control by security forces.

Dia' Rashwan, an expert on terrorism and political Islam at the Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, says: AQOIM "wants to give young people the idea this will be your destiny if you join their enemies, the police and security forces. We are facing an extraordinary situation in Algeria, and there have been at least five attacks in the last two months aimed at police and security forces". David Hartwell, Middle East editor for Jane's Country Risk, told Reuters there was a concern car bombings were carried out by militants who had trained with insurgents fighting US occupation in Iraq. He said: "But the group is viewed increasingly as outsiders coming in to attack Algeria. There's no evidence they have more support among the population".

Rob Mortimer, an historian of Algeria at Haverford College, says the focus on security forces is a change from the days of the civil war. But he cautions that most of the civilian massacres of the 1990s were committed by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). That is different from the GSPC, which evolved into AQOIM in 2006.

A US official familiar with North Africa in September was quoted as describing AQOIM as "not big, but dangerous". The group, he said, had found a "life raft" through affiliating itself with bin Laden's Qaeda. The spike in violence and high death toll from the bombings has raised questions about its strength and the ability of the security forces to counter it.

The US official said AQOIM's attacks did not mean it was stronger. But he expressed concern their access to explosives "seemed to be unhindered and they were able to find places to assemble and train". Most worrying of all, he said, was AQOIM's ability to range across the Sahara and into Sahel countries such as Mali, to train militants from Morocco, Tunisia, Niger, Mauritania and Nigeria. He spoke of gatherings in desert wadis involving four or five trucks and up to 25 people, half of whom would be Algerians from AQOIM. He said: "They would conduct small arms or religious and ideological training for four to six days. Or sometimes the meeting would be for trading the Colombian cocaine by which they earn their money". Gunmen who shot dead four French tourists in Mauritania in December 2007 and were later captured in Guinea-Bissau were from AQOIM.

GSPC was formed in 1998 as an offshoot from the GIA, which fought a brutal decade-long civil war. Now it advocates a Neo-Salafi theocracy in Algeria and the rest of North Africa. After suffering years of dwindling membership attributed to a government amnesty programme, its core membership has recently vowed also to expand operations to Europe (see the background in gmt8AlgWhoFeb19-07).