Category Archives: Al Qaeda

Truce tests relations between Islamist giants in Syria

Aron Lund writes: The U.S.-Russian brokered truce remains deeply controversial among rebels. Hardline jihadis have condemned the peace process, while more pragmatic Islamists have endorsed it. Now, a jihadi crackdown on demonstrators in rebel-held Idlib is testing the alliance between two of the insurgency’s most powerful factions

For Syria’s rebel movement, relations between its two most powerful Islamist factions is a life or death issue. Two large salafist factions, the Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, dominate the insurgency in the Idlib region, and they play a key part in the Hama and Aleppo governorates as well. While these groups are close allies on the battlefield and have often worked hand in hand politically, there are important distinctions between them. The terrorist-listed Nusra Front is outspokenly salafi-jihadi, many of its leaders are foreigners, and the group has pledged allegiance to the international al-Qaida movement. While equally committed to establishing Syria as a Sunni theocracy, Ahrar al-Sham is an indigenously Syrian group, renounces foreign attacks, and courts international support. It is particularly close to Turkey and Qatar.

The Russian-American agreement brokered on February 22, which led to a partial cessation of hostilities in Syria that began on February 27, has tested their alliance and brought previously latent conflicts of interest to the fore. The Nusra Front is explicitly opposed to the deal, indeed to the political process as a whole, describing it as a ”crusader” scheme to extinguish the Syrian uprising. The group has called for continued attacks on the government of President Bashar al-Assad, although it has in practice exercised restraint since February 27, probably for fear of alienating Syrian civilians or drawing the ire of local allies such as Ahrar al-Sham. Nusra fighters describe this as a waiting game, telling a Reuters correspondent that they are ”convinced that it will not work and it is only a matter of time before it officially ends.” Recently, some reports point to increased Nusra activity south of Aleppo, but it is difficult to know what side actually initiates fighting – the Assad government and its Russian allies have not fully ceased their skirmishing with the rebels either. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. strikes in Somalia kill 150 Shabab fighters

The New York Times reports: The fighters had just completed “training for a large-scale attack” against American and African Union forces, said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.

Pentagon officials would not say how they knew that the Shabab fighters killed on Saturday were training for an attack on United States and African Union forces, but the militant group is believed to be under heavy American surveillance.

The Shabab fighters were standing in formation at a facility the Pentagon called Camp Raso, 120 miles north of Mogadishu, when the American warplanes struck on Saturday, officials said, acting on information gleaned from intelligence sources in the area and from American spy planes. One intelligence agency assessed that the toll might have been higher had the strike happened earlier in the ceremony. Apparently, some fighters were filtering away from the event when the bombing began.

The strike was another escalation in what has become the latest battleground in the Obama administration’s war against terror: Africa. The United States and its allies are focused on combating the spread of the Islamic State in Libya, and American officials estimate that with an influx of men from Iraq, Syria and Tunisia, the Islamic State’s forces in Libya have swelled to as many as 6,500 fighters, allowing the group to capture a 150-mile stretch of coastline over the past year.

The arrival of the Islamic State in Libya has sparked fears that the group’s reach could spread to other North African countries, and the United States is increasingly trying to prevent that. American forces are now helping to combat Al Qaeda in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso; Boko Haram in Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad; and the Shabab in Somalia and Kenya, in what has become a multifront war against militant Islam in Africa. [Continue reading…]

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Former Petraeus adviser, Lt Col David Kilcullen: ‘No ISIS if we didn’t invade Iraq’

In a review of Kilcullen’s new book, Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror, David Gardner writes: “The greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia” is how David Kilcullen describes George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. If anyone thinks that is a throwaway line they should read on. For it comes from one of the architects of the 2007-08 “surge” into Iraq that sought to restore security to a society the US-led occupation broke, and to create space to rebuild a state it destroyed.

Kilcullen was a young lieutenant colonel in the Australian army who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, a scholar steeped in counter-insurgency theory, “watching closely and keeping notes as this enormous slow-motion train wreck took place”. In 2007 he was seconded to US forces as chief adviser to General David Petraeus, commander of the surge. This strategy combined a big influx of American troops with co-opted Sunni tribal fighters to defeat al-Qaeda. The jihadis, later to transmute into the far greater threat of Isis, had virtually no presence in Iraq prior to the invasion — but used it to turn the country into a charnel house and trigger the region-wide war between Sunni and Shia Islam that has now ripped Syria apart.

Put simply, Kilcullen argues we should never have gone into Iraq, with the job still unfinished in Afghanistan after 9/11. But the US and its allies were morally and legally obliged afterwards to try to “halt the carnage and restore some normality”. Like many soldiers, Kilcullen does not do gore. So when he mentions, in the sparest of prose given the depravity of the sectarian bloodletting, the “commercial kidnapping gangs auctioning off terrified children for slaughter, in a makeshift night market that operated under lights near the soccer stadium”, it is a kick in the stomach.

The surge sharply reduced the violence. But the US, now under President Barack Obama, had exhausted its attention span. Meanwhile, Iraqi leaders twisted by sectarianism would not use the space this success created for reconciliation.

Mr Obama, to be fair, was elected on a pledge to extract Americans from Middle East wars. Yet in Kilcullen’s judgment, he left Iraq irresponsibly early. He failed to register how Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Islamist premier and joint protégé of the US and Iran, was stampeding Iraq’s Sunni minority into jihadi arms by his sectarian power grab. With al-Qaeda wounded by its “near death experience” with the surge, few noticed its rebirth in the ashes of Syria. Recklessness in Iraq was followed by fecklessness in Syria — “passivity in the face of catastrophe” that spells strategic disaster for the US and the west. [Continue reading…]

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The carve-up of Syria is already happening under Obama’s Plan A

assad-2

Michael Weiss writes: “Syria,” properly speaking, no longer exists. The nation-state cobbled together a hundred years ago by the great powers, albeit with borders periodically rejiggered since, is FUBAR and will henceforward remain a balkanized set of cantons or fiefs ruled by a panoply of antagonistic sectarian insurgencies, proxies, and terrorist organizations — some elements, including the one residing in the presidential palace in Damascus, adequately meeting the definitions for all three categories. And it really doesn’t matter if every last Sukhoi fighter jet, Scud missile, and barrel bomb gets put away on Saturday, when the truce is set to commence.

I say that because the best-case scenario for Kerry’s last-ditch, now-don’t-hold-me-to-this prescription for ending a modern and globally transformative holocaust is that war actually continues, only against the “right” targets, namely al Qaeda and ISIS. These are the two U.N.-designated terrorist organizations not party to or expected to abide by the ceasefire. Their spoiler potential for provoking others to violate the terms of the agreement is enormous, as both militancies collectively boast an order of battle greater than that of the mobilized Syrian Arab Army.

As Andrew Tabler, a Syria specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, puts it, the central dilemma is gauging what constitutes success for Kerry’s quixotic program: “Is the bar that fewer people are dying or is the bar that more people are fighting terrorism?”

If the latter, then how do you accomplish that when every security agency of the executive branch believes that Russia is not going to stop bombing the anti-Assad opposition so as long as it can claim it is only hitting terrorists, the Kremlin’s abiding lie since September 30, when it started bombing?

Yes, the Russian Air Force does go after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s minions on occasion, whenever they dare to interdict Russian- and Iranian-abetted regime advances against other rebel groups, as they are currently doing in Aleppo. On the whole, however, Putin’s air war, as the US-led coalition now concludes, has allowed ISIS to acquire terrain where the opposition had previously prevented it from doing so. The best the U.S. has done by way of deterrence is a ceasefire the U.S. thinks is a dud. [Continue reading…]

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Crackdowns on free speech rise across a Europe wary of terror

The New York Times reports: A puppet show at an open square in Madrid during Carnival festivities this month featured a policeman who tried to entrap a witch. The puppet officer held up a little sign to falsely accuse her, using a play on words that combined Al Qaeda and ETA, the Basque separatist group.

Angry parents complained, and the real police stepped in. They arrested two puppeteers, who could now face as much as seven years in prison on charges of glorifying terrorism and promoting hatred.

Paradoxically, the puppeteers say in their defense, the police proved their point: that Spain’s antiterrorism laws are being misapplied, used for witch hunts.

Far from an isolated episode, the arrests on Feb. 5 are part of a lengthening string of prosecutions, including two against a rap musician and a poet, that have fueled a debate over whether freedom of protest and speech are under threat in Spain and elsewhere in Europe because of fears of terrorism. [Continue reading…]

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The evolution of al Qaeda and ISIS

Charles Lister writes: While the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2010 challenged al-Qaida’s insistence that only violent jihad can secure political change, the subsequent repression and resulting instability provided an opportunity. What followed was a period of extraordinary strategic review. Beginning with Ansar al-Sharia in Yemen (in 2010 and 2011) and then with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar al-Din, and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) in Mali (2012), al-Qaida began developing a new strategy focused on slowly nurturing unstable and vulnerable societies into hosts for an al-Qaida Islamic state. Although a premature imposition of harsh Shariah norms caused projects in Yemen and Mali to fail, al-Qaida’s activities in Syria and Yemen today look to have perfected the new “long game” approach.

In Syria and Yemen, al-Qaida has taken advantage of weak states suffering from acute socio-political instability in order to embed itself within popular revolutionary movements. Through a consciously managed process of “controlled pragmatism,” al-Qaida has successfully integrated its fighters into broader dynamics that, with additional manipulation, look all but intractable. Through a temporary renunciation of Islamic hudud (fixed punishments in the Quran and Hadith) and an overt insistence on multilateral populist action, al-Qaida has begun socializing entire communities into accepting its role within their revolutionary societies. With durable roots in these operational zones — “safe bases,” as Zawahiri calls them — al-Qaida hopes one day to proclaim durable Islamic emirates as individual components of an eventual caliphate.

The Islamic State (or ISIS), on the other hand, has emerged as al-Qaida’s obstreperous and brutally rebellious younger sibling. Seeking rapid and visible results, ISIS worries little about taking the time to win popular acceptance and instead controls territory through force and psychological intimidation. As a militarily capable and administratively accomplished organization, ISIS has acquired a strong stranglehold over parts of Iraq and Syria — like Raqqa, Deir el-Zour, and Mosul — but its roots are shallow at best elsewhere in both countries. With effective and representative local partners, the U.S.-led coalition can and will eventually take back much of ISIS’s territory, but evidence thus far suggests progress will be slow.

Meanwhile, ISIS has developed invaluable strategic depth elsewhere in the world, through its acquisition of affiliates — or additional “states” for its Caliphate — in Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Russia. Although it will struggle to expand much beyond its current geographical reach, the growing importance of ISIS in Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan-Pakistan in particular will allow the movement to survive pressures it faces in Syria and Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian rebels see flaws in U.S.-Russian truce plan

Reuters reports: The United States and Russia announced plans for a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria that would take effect on Saturday but exclude groups such as Islamic State and al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, a loophole Syrian rebels immediately highlighted as a problem.

Monday’s agreement, described by a U.N. spokesman as “a first step towards a more durable ceasefire,” is the fruit of intensive diplomacy between Washington and Moscow, which back opposing sides in the 5-year-old civil war that has killed more than 250,000 people.

Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin discussed the accord by phone, and the Kremlin leader said it could “radically transform the crisis situation in Syria.” The White House said it could help advance talks on bringing about political change in Syria.

To succeed, the deal will require both countries to persuade their allies on the ground to comply. Fighting and air strikes continued on Monday, according to a British-based monitoring group.

The plan allows the Syrian army and allied forces, as well as Syrian opposition fighters, to respond with “proportionate use of force” in self-defense. It leaves a significant loophole by allowing further attacks, including air strikes, against Islamic State, Nusra and other militant groups.

Bashar al-Zoubi, head of the political office of the Yarmouk Army, part of the rebel Free Syrian Army, said that would provide cover for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies to keep attacking opposition-held territory where rebel and militant factions are tightly packed.

“Russia and the regime will target the areas of the revolutionaries on the pretext of the Nusra Front’s presence, and you know how mixed those areas are, and if this happens, the truce will collapse,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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The Kingdom and the Caliphate: Duel of the Islamic states

Baghdadi

Cole Bunzel writes: For Osama bin Laden, the United States was the “head of the snake” — the primary target of al-Qaeda’s jihad. “Its many tails,” the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, were deemed of secondary importance.

For Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, however, it is the regime in Saudi Arabia that is the “head of the snake,” as he has said in a metaphorical revision worthy of note. This revision by the leader of the Islamic State marks a significant change in the priorities of the global jihadi movement now spearheaded by that group. Notwithstanding the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, this group’s focus is on the Middle East before the West. Its slogan, “remaining and expanding,” is indicative of its foremost aims: entrenching itself in its Syrian and Iraqi territories and conquering new ones. One of those territories increasingly in its sights is Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest places and one-quarter of the world’s known oil reserves.

The competition between the jihadi statelet and the Gulf monarchy is playing out on two levels, one ideological and one material.

Ideologically, the Islamic State presents itself as the true guardian of the particular version of Islam native to Saudi Arabia — that is, Wahhabism, a variant of Salafism. Over the past two decades the jihadi-Salafi movement, which encompasses both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, has become more Wahhabi in orientation, its leaders and thinkers rooting their radical ideas in the Wahhabi tradition. Wahhabism has thus emerged as the most prominent feature of the Islamic State’s ideology. It follows that the conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State can be understood as one between competing models of the same idea, namely, an Islamic state. Both are self-professed Islamic polities claiming to represent Wahhabi Islam.

Materially, the Islamic State has launched a string of attacks on Saudi soil, targeting Shia civilians and Saudi security forces, and has made its presence official with the establishment of three declared provinces. The latter are, of course, provinces in name only. The Islamic State does not administer or oversee territory in Saudi Arabia; it carries out terrorist attacks in the name of an administrative fiction that it hopes one day to make reality. While for the foreseeable future the provinces will remain fictional, the terrorism intended to realize them is likely to continue.

Throughout 2015, several authors offered rather unfavorable comparisons of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State, some drawing a direct line from one to the other. They pointed out the similar educational curricula used by the two and the shared practice of beheading, among other things. Kamel Daoud, in a November 2015 New York Times op-ed, argued that “Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it,” referring to the group by the Arabic acronym for its former name — a “dressed up” form of the same thing. But for the most part these comparisons are wide of the mark, as Saudi Arabia seeks partnership with the West and does not aspire to global conquest.

The comparison worth noting is the one in the minds of the Islamic State’s jihadi thinkers, the idea that Saudi Arabia is a failed version of the Islamic State. As they see it, Saudi Arabia started out, way back in the mid-eighteenth century, as something much like the Islamic State but gradually lost its way, abandoning its expansionist tendencies and sacrificing the aggressive spirit of early Wahhabism at the altar of modernity. This worldview is the starting point for understanding the contest between the kingdom and the caliphate, two very different versions of Islamic states competing over a shared religious heritage and territory. [Continue reading…]

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Russia facilitates ceasefire deals with safe passage for ISIS and Nusra Front fighters

Reuters reports: Pro-government sources say the Russian role has expanded to include facilitating local ceasefires in rebel-held areas around Damascus, with the aim of creating a secure buffer around the capital. Syrian Minister of National Reconciliation Ali Haidar described the process as purely Syrian even if there had at times been Russian help.

“The truth is that since the presence of the Russians on Syrian land, they can play the role of mediator in some areas,” he said at his offices in Damascus. “The Russians make contact (with militants) when they can, of course – in Douma and other areas,” he said, in reference to an area east of Damascus.” Sometimes it is the militants who request mediation by the Russians,” he said. Those wishing to relocate wanted guarantees of safe passage to rebel strongholds, and those wishing to stay wanted to be sure they wouldn’t be killed later on, he said. According to the non-Syrian sources interviewed by Reuters, Russian advisers orchestrated two deals in which hardline Islamist fighters were evacuated from the south toward areas their groups control in the northern and central provinces.

One of the non-Syrian military sources said the Russians worked “in the shadows” to facilitate the ceasefire deals. In some cases the Russians operated as guarantors for the deals.

Dozens of cars left southern towns of Syria in December carrying fighters from Nusra Front with their families to the northern province of Idlib which is under control of an alliance of rebels including Nusra Front. Weeks later a convoy left Hajar al-Aswad and Yarmouk camp areas near Damascus carrying fighters and families from Islamic State to the group’s stronghold of Raqqa.

A second source who was informed of the deals said the fighters were given safe passage. The aim was to empty these areas of hardline Islamists so clearing the way for the government to strike deals with the remaining rebels.

“The Russians want all the battles to be focused in the north, they want the south and Damascus and the coastal line all neutralized. Ultimately they are working toward achieving a wider political solution,” said the source. [Continue reading…]

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The offline allure of ISIS

ISIS-instructor

TSG IntelBrief: Two recent announcements highlight the difference between the so-called Islamic State’s reach on social media and its real-world appeal. On February 5, 2016, Twitter announced it had suspended more than 125,000 accounts for supporting terrorism since mid-2015. On the same day, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that 34 militant groups worldwide had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as of last December, with more likely in 2016. The Islamic State’s social media efforts have always received disproportionate attention. Less attention has been paid to the offline power of the group in terms of radicalization and recruitment. Social networks matter more than social media when it comes to proliferating the ideology of bin-Ladinism espoused by both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

From pamphlets to audio cassette tapes—and now videos and mobile messaging apps—terrorists have always sought to broadcast their ideology to motivate and rally people to their cause. But the real propagation of terrorism requires salesmen and saleswomen—people who understand that the principles of persuasion begin with a deep understanding of the prospective customer. Graphic tweets may produce headlines, but persuasive individuals produce recruits, often in clusters.

The eight young men who left the Lisleby district of Fredrikstad, Norway, to join the Islamic State in Syria did not join because of social media, even if it did help spread the group’s message. All were reportedly motivated to join the Islamic State by the example of Abdullah Chaib, a charismatic local soccer player who traveled to Syria in 2012. The small group of friends created a feedback loop of motivation and encouragement that did not depend on Twitter or Facebook. Likewise, the terror recruit cluster in Molenbeek, Belgium thrived on networks built around friendship and familial ties, not Telegram or Kik. This same dynamic of peer-to-peer recruitment and consistent face-to-face interaction produced the cluster in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region of Minnesota. Long-time foreign fighter hotbeds such as Derna, Libya, and Bizerte and Ben Gardane in Tunisia rely on decidedly offline networks to export extremism. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s disastrous betrayal of the Syrian rebels

Emile Hokayem writes: What a difference a year makes in Syria. And the introduction of massive Russian airpower.

Last February, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its Shiite auxiliaries mounted a large-scale attempt to encircle Aleppo, the northern city divided between regime and rebels since 2012 and battered by the dictator’s barrel bombs. Islamist and non-Islamist mainstream rebels — to the surprise of those who have derided their performance, let alone their existence — repelled the offensive at the time. What followed was a string of rebel advances across the country, which weakened Assad so much that they triggered Moscow’s direct intervention in September, in concert with an Iranian surge of forces, to secure his survival.

Fast-forward a year. After a slow start — and despite wishful Western assessments that Moscow could not sustain a meaningful military effort abroad — the Russian campaign is finally delivering results for the Assad regime. This week, Russian airpower allowed Assad and his allied paramilitary forces to finally cut off the narrow, rebel-held “Azaz corridor” that links the Turkish border to the city of Aleppo. The city’s full encirclement is now a distinct possibility, with regime troops and Shiite fighters moving from the south, the west, and the north. Should the rebel-held parts of the city ultimately fall, it will be a dramatic victory for Assad and the greatest setback to the rebellion since the start of the uprising in 2011.

In parallel, Russia has put Syria’s neighbors on notice of the new rules of the game. Jordan was spooked into downgrading its help for the Southern Front, the main non-Islamist alliance in the south of the country, which has so far prevented extremist presence along its border. Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian military aircraft that crossed its airspace in November backfired: Moscow vengefully directed its firepower on Turkey’s rebel friends across Idlib and Aleppo provinces. Moscow also courted Syria’s Kurds, who found a new partner to play off the United States in their complex relations with Washington. And Russia has agreed to a temporary accommodation of Israel’s interests in southern Syria.

Inside Syria, and despite the polite wishes of Secretary of State John Kerry, the overwhelming majority of Russian strikes have hit non-Islamic State (IS) fighters. Indeed, Moscow and the Syrian regime are content to see the United States bear the lion’s share of the effort against the jihadi monster in the east, instead concentrating on mowing through the mainstream rebellion in western Syria. Their ultimate objective is to force the world to make an unconscionable choice between Assad and IS. [Continue reading…]

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As long as the linkage between authoritarian regimes and extremism is ignored, ISIS and al Qaeda will never be defeated

Joyce Karam writes: “What are you talking about, 7000…No,no. We killed 38,000”, those were the words of former Syrian General Rifaat Assad in1982 as recounted by Thomas Friedman in his book “From Beirut to Jerusalem”. Rifaat, who is now in exile, was exulting about the number of Syrians his forces killed in Hama 34 years ago, quashing a rebellion against his brother’s dictatorship and setting the stage to what has followed.

The ghosts of Hama today hover all over Syria, cementing the pillars of the Assad doctrine to rule by fear and hold on to power at any cost even if it means surrendering the country to devastation, radicalization and ultimate death. From father to uncle to son, the Assad playbook has not changed, copying the narrative of Hama to Homs, Douma, Ghouta, Idlib, Daraa and Aleppo, and in the process leaving behind more than 250 thousands dead, millions displaced, and a society in shambles.

The 3-week assault on Hama in 1982 has laid the ground for how the Assad regime reacts to any signs of rebellion later. Not coincidentally, the same horror tactics utilized in Hama in 1982 with Assad the father were replicated by the son across Syria following the 2011 uprising.

In a chilling report by Amnesty International in 2012, survivors of the Hama massacre give their account of what happened, describing images of the dead splintered in the streets, left to be eaten by dogs and as a red flag for those whose lives were spared. Snipers were on the roofs, neighborhoods were razed and one survivor recalls the the attack on Mas’oud Mosque, where “some 60 men were killed before the security forces cut off their fingers and placed them along the mosque’s walls.” She tells Amnesty “for around two years after the massacre, no one dared remove the fingers. They were so frightened.” [Continue reading…]

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Syrian rebel splits deepen after failed ‘merger’ with Nusra

Reuters reports: The leader of al Qaeda’s Syrian wing tried unsuccessfully at a recent meeting to convince rival Islamist factions to merge into one unit, several insurgency sources have told Reuters.

Abu Mohamad al-Golani, head of the Nusra Front, even suggested he was willing to change the name of his group if the others, including the powerful Ahrar al-Sham organisation, agreed to the deal, the sources said.

But he made clear that Nusra would not cut its ties with al Qaeda, and its allegiance would remain to Ayman al-Zawahri, who took over as leader after U.S. Navy SEALS killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Much was riding on the outcome of the meeting, which the sources said took place about 10 days ago.

Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are the most powerful groups in northern Syria: when they briefly teamed up with other Islamists last year in an alliance called the Fatah Army, the rebels scored one of their biggest victories by seizing the city of Idlib. [Continue reading…]

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Why Burkina Faso is a choice target as al-Qaeda bids to reclaim stolen thunder

By Berny Sèbe, University of Birmingham

The latest terror attack in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, on Friday 15 January, announced the bloody entry of an al-Qaeda franchise into a country that had so far been spared the traumas of radical Islamism.

At first glance, this looks like the spillover from a wider conflict with militant Islamists across North and West Africa – but the attacks have as much to do with Burkina Faso itself as with global jihadist movements and their goals.

Nestled just underneath Mali and Niger in West Africa, Burkina Faso is still in the midst of a democratic transition which began in 2014 with the ousting of its president of 27 years, Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré was a towering regional figure: having orchestrated the assassination of his predecessor Thomas Sankara in 1987, he changed course and made his country a staunch ally of the West.

As abductions by militant groups in the region steadily mounted from the early 2000s onwards, he became a go-to negotiator whenever Western powers tried to free hostages held in the Sahara. Ouagadougou became a natural base for negotiations and regional dealmaking, whilst at the same time remaining a crucial logistical base for the French army.

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The Burkina Faso attack shows how al-Qaeda is exploiting weak governments in West Africa

Omar Mohammed reports: The attacks in Burkina Faso that left 28 people dead and 55 injured point to an increasing security challenge in West Africa, where, analysts say, militant groups affiliated to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are taking advantage of fragile and weak states to hit western targets.

This is the second time in a couple of months that militants launched an assaulted directed at an establishment popular with foreigners. In neighboring Mali last November, in a similar fashion to what happened at the Splendid Hotel in Ouagadougou, gunmen stormed the Radisson Hotel in Bamako and took 170 people hostage and ultimately killing 21 people many of whom westerners.

In both of these cases, the militant group Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) claimed responsibility.

AQIM, which traces its roots to the Algerian civil conflict in the 1990s and became an al-Qaeda affiliate in mid-2000s, has increasingly focused their strategies on targets located in countries that are either weak or unstable. In west Africa, it has targeted Algeria, Niger, Mali killing people and carrying out kidnappings for ransom, all done with the objective of ridding the region of what they perceive to be the corrupting influence of the West. [Continue reading…]

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Jakarta, Paris, San Bernardino: The age of ‘marauding terrorist firearms attacks’

Christopher Dickey writes: While America slept, terrorists struck in Jakarta on Thursday, and their multi-pronged attack hit, most dramatically, a symbol of the United States: a Starbucks coffee shop.

Despite bombs going off, a hostage-taking, and an extended gunfight with Indonesian police around Thamrin Street (near several embassies, luxury hotels, and the offices of the United Nations), casualties were fairly low by the standards of modern terrorism. Initial reports say seven people died, including five attackers, which would seem both a credit to the response of the Indonesian authorities and a reflection of the killers’ ineptitude.

A website linked to the so-called Islamic State claimed responsibility in the name of the putative caliphate for the attack, “targeting foreign nationals and the security forces charged with protecting them in the Indonesian capital.”

Back in November, police reportedly picked up ISIS chatter about a “concert” planned for Indonesia, and perhaps 100 Indonesian citizens are believed to have joined ISIS’s ranks in Syria.

But the particular affiliations of the madmen are less important than their method in this case. The siege by squads of terrorists using assault rifles and low-grade explosives to slaughter innocent people at cafés, stadiums, hotels, shopping malls, and such has become standard operating procedure for violent extremists all over the map. [Continue reading…]

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Burkina Faso attack demonstrates al Qaeda revival in Africa

CNN reports: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, often seen as a fractured and undisciplined group, apparently has carried out its second major terror attack in two months — claiming more than 20 lives in the assault on a luxury hotel and two other targets in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.

The gun attack on the Splendid Hotel bears many similarities to that on the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali, on November 20 in which 22 people were killed.

Both targets were popular with Westerners and international (especially U.N). officials; they were “soft,” rather than military installations or police stations. The attackers (two in Bamako, possibly four in Ouagadougou) were armed with automatic weapons, their aim to kill and then take as many hostages as possible.

And both operations apparently were carried out by an AQIM group called Al Mourabitoun.

The group’s statement after the latest attack claimed the Splendid Hotel was “frequented by staff of the nations of global disbelief;” the attack was “to punish the cross-worshippers for their crimes against our people in Central Africa, Mali, and other lands of the Muslims.” [Continue reading…]

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