A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  On 26 December 1991 the FIS easily won the first round of parliamentary elections, attracting 48 percent of the overall popular vote and capturing 188 of the 232 seats decided. When an FIS government seemed inevitable, the army moved quickly to intervene. It was well understood that FIS leaders did not think any more of democracy than did the FLN, even if they could make it work for their purposes, and many observers believed that an FIS government would, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian put it at the time, insist on “one man, one vote, one time.” Some observers of the 2011 Arab Spring harbour similar fears.

  On 11 January 1992 the army cancelled the election, forcing President Chadli Bendjedid to resign, and brought in the exiled independence fighter Mohammed Boudiaf to serve as a new puppet president. In response, FIS supporters got the gun, beginning a struggle between moderate pragmatists and militant Islamic fundamentalists (Salafists) that continues to the present and has claimed between 150,000 and 200,000 Algerian lives over the past twenty years.

  The Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA, or Armed Islamic Group) was founded in 1992 from a collection of Salafist groups (movements that struggled to return to the fundamentals of Islam, based on the original Islamic texts and scriptures). Many leading members of the FIS were “Afghan-Arabs”; that is, they were mujahideen returning from the successful struggle against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Inexorably, the political FIS evolved into a more militant and focused GIA. Initially, GIA guerrillas targeted the army and police as supporters of the government, but later they embarked on a series of massacres, killing tens of thousands of Muslim Algerian civilians and conducting a massive purge of journalists and “intellectuals,” including many schoolteachers who were deemed to be poisoning young minds against the true practice of the faith. The GIA, however, was wracked with internal dissension and retribution, and its popularity declined as extreme violence became its signature theme. Indeed, the GIA set the scene for many subsequent Al Qaeda horrors.

  In December 1994, seven years before 9/11, the GIA hijacked an Air France jetliner in a failed bid to crash it into the streets of Paris. The hijackers ordered the pilots to fly from Algiers to Marseilles, where the aircraft was to be fully fuelled. French military commandos stormed the plane without warning in Marseilles, freeing all 171 passengers and killing the four hijackers.

  In 1998 the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC, or Salafist Group for Call and Combat) was formed by splintering from the GIA, in the belief that its brutal tactics were hurting the Islamist cause. The GSPC gained support from the Algerian population by vowing to continue fighting the government while avoiding the indiscriminate killing of civilians.

  In 2000 the GSPC made a murderous attack on an Algerian base, killing over forty paratroopers, and over the next two years authorities in Europe foiled GSPC attacks in Frankfurt and against the American Embassy in Rome. Dutch authorities thwarted a planned bombing of the American Embassy in Paris by the GSPC in September 2001. Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, the GSPC issued a public statement supporting Osama Bin Laden’s jihad against America.

  Attracting a great deal of media attention, particularly in Europe, the GSPC began a trend of which I was to become part when, in May 2003, its members kidnapped thirty-two European tourists, most of them German, Austrian, or Swiss, killing one. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the “emir” of the group that took Louis and me, is thought to have been involved in this operation. Algerian troops subsequently rescued seventeen of the hostages and the remainder were released a few months later when, allegedly, a ransom of 5 million Euros was paid.

  The next couple of years were punctuated by frequent murderous operations against Algerian security personnel and facilities. By 2000 the GSPC had consolidated its operations and taken over the GIA’s assets in Europe as well as its funding network.

  In September 2006 the GSPC joined forces with Al Qaeda, whose then second-in-command (now commander), Ayman Al Zawahiri, welcomed a “blessed union” between the groups, declaring France an enemy and indicating that the newly formed group would fight against French and American interests. In January 2007 the GSPC announced that it had changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) to reflect its alliance with Al Qaeda, from which it receives material and financial support.

  Two buildings were attacked in April 2007, one of them the UN headquarters in Algiers, where thirty-seven were killed and two hundred wounded. In September 2007 an AQIM suicide bomber attempted to assassinate Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and although the president was not harmed, 107 Algerians were wounded and twenty-two were killed. At the end of December 2007, four French tourists were murdered as they picnicked on the side of a road near Aleg, a small town 150 miles east of Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott. (The incident acted as a springboard for a novel by Jean-Christophe Rufin entitled Katiba, with a protagonist named Kader Bel Kader rather than, say, Mokhtar Belmokhtar.)

  The death toll continued to mount in 2008. Back-to-back attacks on 19 and 20 August killed dozens of people. The first was a suicide car bombing at a police college in Issers, east of Algiers, killing forty-eight people. A day later, two more car bombs struck in Bouira, southeast of Algiers. The second explosion in Bouira killed twelve Algerian employees of the Canadian engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, although my abductors insisted that the victims were all Canadians.

  A year later, in October 2009, six private security guards working for SNC-Lavalin were killed during an ambush in the Kabylie region, east of Algiers, and an Algerian employee of SNC-Lavalin was kidnapped in January 2010. According to the U.S.-based security-monitoring group Site, AQIM was responsible for thirty-two attacks on Algerian security forces between 7 July and 29 August 2011, killing and injuring more than two hundred.

  AQIM aims to weaken and ultimately overthrow the Algerian government, which it seeks to replace with Islamic rule based on a “pure” interpretation of the Qur’an.

  In May 2011, AQIM allegedly kidnapped a British and an Italian engineer in Birnin Kebbi, a city in the far northwestern part of Nigeria, located just across the border from Niger and only a couple of hundred kilometres from Niamey. Press reports alleged connivance between AQIM and Boko Haram, a violent terrorist sect of Islamic extremists operating across the northern half of Nigeria. While AQIM appears not to have claimed responsibility for this abduction, further indication that AQIM is expanding its reach into Nigeria—an allegation that Nigerian government representatives maintain is true—would have deeply unsettling implications. Over the past ten years, extreme violence between the Christian and Islamic communities in Nigeria has become endemic and has seen many thousands of people killed—just the sort of situation AQIM would be eager to exploit. Boko Haram’s June 2011 attack on police headquarters in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, and its destruction of UN headquarters in Nigeria two months later—an assault that caused appalling casualties—offer chilling insight into the impact of AQIM’s expanding reach.

  Originally, AQIM’s objectives seemed limited to the overthrow of Algeria’s secular military government and the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate, a theocracy based on Shari’a law that for twelve centuries spanned much of the Muslim world. Counter-terrorism experts believe, however, that the group’s folding into the global Al Qaeda structure may indicate a shift to take up the banner of global jihad and collude on future attacks in North and West Africa and western Europe.

  According to Blake Mobley and Eric Rosenbach of the Center for Policing Terrorism at the Manhattan Institute, AQIM’s organizational methods “are not well understood, but they seem to structure themselves in Algeria according to seven defined and homogenous territorial blocks (with an emir at the top), an overarching ‘media’ unit, ‘production’ unit, and council of notables, which may function as an executive board. GSPC operations in Europe seem to be arranged into small cells scattered among major European cities, much like Al Qaeda’s structure.”


  While Mobley and Rosenbach insist that they are only speculating, everything I saw fits such a structure. In fact, I think that the meeting described in Chapter 3 of this book with representatives of what Louis and I assumed to be some kind of board of directors could well have been with members of such an overseeing body as a council of notables.

  AQIM engages in bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and paramilitary operations. Since the 1990s the group has focused most of its attacks on Algerian security personnel and facilities and foreign workers to achieve its primary goal of overthrowing the Algerian government and ridding at least that “Muslim land” of the presence of infidels. Following its formal alliance with Al Qaeda, AQIM expanded its aims and declared its intention to attack Western targets more generally. AQIM employs conventional terrorist tactics for the most part, such as guerrilla-style ambushes and mortar, rocket, and IED attacks. The group added suicide bombings to its repertoire in April 2007. AQIM operates primarily in northern coastal areas of Algeria and in parts of the desert regions of southern Algeria and northern Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Its principal sources of funding are extortion, kidnapping, donations, and the trafficking of narcotics, people, and weapons.

  The Algerian government has accused Iran and Sudan of financing AQIM, but whatever the merits of those accusations, the group seems to receive funding from sizable, sympathetic diasporas in Western countries and from the Persian Gulf region and, more recently, from drug trafficking through an allegedly budding association with FARC in Colombia. Al Qaeda–Central also provides materiel, media, and financial support to AQIM. In addition, AQIM has many members abroad, the majority located in western Europe, who provide direct financial and logistical support, much of it raised through illegal activities. It would be foolhardy to presume that AQIM is not also well established in North America, within the North African diaspora communities.

  The Algerian government alleges that its counter-terrorism efforts have reduced the group’s ranks to fewer than a thousand, a number, incidentally, that our captors also used to describe their current strength. This is just about the only thing of which I am aware on which the Algerian government and AQIM agree.

  APPENDIX B

  MANAGING THE AQIM THREAT

  In the context of misconceptions and myth busting, since our kidnapping and release there has been a lot of frankly ill-informed commentary on whether or not the countries of the Sahel are doing enough to counter, and defeat, the AQIM threat.

  Olivier Guitta, a security and geopolitical consultant based in Europe, wrote in a special to GlobalPost on 20 February 2010, “Mali is very much at risk of losing its image of neutrality. Years of hard work and good governance could go up in smoke unless the current regime implements a true, cohesive counterterrorism policy.” How, though, does Mr. Guitta believe that Mali, which ranked 178 out of the 182 countries rated by the United Nations Development Programme in its 2009 Human Development Report, is going to accomplish this miracle?

  Mali is close to a hundred times the size of the Six Counties that constitute Northern Ireland. At the height of “The Troubles,” in the early 1970s, close to 45,000 soldiers and police were engaged in the struggle to defeat the Irish Republican Army, a force five or six times the size of Mali’s armed forces. The British army was, and remains, one of the most effective armed forces in the world, but nobody has offered such an assessment of the Malian forces. The British were well equipped in their fight against the IRA, employing state-of-the-art surveillance gear on the ground and in the air, and they had extensive experience in counter-insurgency and anti-terrorist operations. Mali’s military equipment could not be more rudimentary.

  At the peak of its operations, the IRA might have been able to field as many as eight hundred fighters, with many others in support; three to four hundred on active service was their steady state, again with perhaps three times that number offering various kinds of assistance. As noted previously, AQIM might now have as many as a thousand men under arms, but no more than two to three hundred are likely to be operating in the vicinity of northern Mali. The British forces never defeated the IRA in the field, a field a lot more benign than the Sahara desert. How could anybody reasonably expect the Malians to do better against AQIM? But all too often one sees and hears such suggestions.

  Today Algeria boasts a regular armed force (Armée Nationale Populaire, or ANP) of 140,000, which includes a relatively sophisticated air force, a reserve force of 100,000, the Gendarmerie Nationale with 60,000, and the Sûreté Nationale with 30,000. In nearly twenty years, Algeria has failed to eradicate the Salafist threat (FIS, GIA, GSPC, and AQIM) despite using tactics that, recalling Dean Acheson’s memorable application of Wordsworth to his impression of Canada, would have caused the “stern daughter of the voice of God” to quiver with indignation—had we paid much attention.

  In October 2010, on the ninth anniversary of “the American invasion,” there were 120,000 troops from forty-seven coalition countries in Afghanistan, as the Taliban claimed it controlled 75 percent of the country. According to the UN special representative’s quarterly report to the Security Council at the end of September 2010, violence was 69 percent higher for the three months ending on 14 September than it had been for the same period the previous year, the deterioration of security being most evident in the increase in roadside bomb explosions, which rose 82 percent over the same period in 2009.

  If the Brits could not defeat the IRA in tiny Northern Ireland over decades of struggle, a forty-seven-nation NATO-led (i.e., American) venture has not been able to defeat the Taliban in ten years, and 110,000 Soviets met with similar success over the previous decade, our expectations of what the impoverished nations of West Africa might achieve ought to be modest indeed.

  I also contend, however, that the fight against AQIM in the Sahara, in addition to being more relevant to Western interests, is likely to be more easily prosecuted and with significantly less “collateral damage” to the inhabitants of the region than any other counter-insurgency operation I can think of. This is, first, because there are almost no permanent settlements within this vast region and, second, because there are very few innocent civilians transiting it and they could, at least for a time, be discouraged from traversing a war zone. Clearly, classic and extravagant Algerian prickliness remains an issue but surely that could be managed with a little focused diplomacy.

  The impoverished nations of the Sahel—under siege from a radically changing climate as the Sahara marches relentlessly southward, chronic food insufficiencies, an exponentially increasing population, and an expanding Islamic fundamentalist insurgency seeking to establish self-sustaining safe havens—desperately need help. They cannot possibly defeat this threat on their own. The consequences of not helping and allowing AQIM to expand and prosper would be felt throughout western Europe and well beyond.

  According to a 20 November 2010 report in the Algerian daily Ennahar, Mali’s President Touré, commenting on the worsening plight of the seven employees of the giant French nuclear company, Areva, who were kidnapped from their beds in Arlit in northern Niger two months earlier, said he considered AQIM “an increasing danger,” adding that he believed “an invisible and highly mobile enemy that crosses borders and benefits from collusion may be more dangerous than people think. But,” he insisted, “the threat is not only military, it is also ideological. And there, nobody knows the limits.”

  Could anybody claim that whatever we are doing in Afghanistan and others are doing in Yemen is more relevant, more important, or more pressing in terms of the preservation of our Western values and the lives and livelihoods of our citizens (to say nothing of the impact on the friendships and alliances we have nurtured throughout western and northern Africa for fifty years) than allowing AQIM—the largest of the Al Qaeda franchises—to root itself deeply into a seven-thousand-kilometre wide, thousand-kilometre deep corridor across the widest part of Africa between the Atlantic and Indian oceans?

  The United States and othe
rs have for some time been discreetly providing much-needed training and equipment to Mali’s armed forces under the Pan-Sahel Initiative. Recently, Algeria has spearheaded efforts to improve coordination among that country, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger in efforts to fight AQIM by establishing a unified command centre in the southern Algerian town of Tamanrasset, something they had all been talking about for years. In addition, the four countries agreed to establish the Sahel–Saharan Intelligence Centre, or CRS (Centre de Renseignement sur le Sahel) in Algiers, made up of senior officers from the member countries. It is currently headed by Major-General Attafi, the head of Algeria’s counter-espionage directorate and Algeria’s counter-terrorism coordinator.

  Following the kidnapping of the Areva seven in September 2010, the chiefs of staff of these countries met in Tamanrasset to discuss counter-terrorist operations. According to the website Magharebia, after the meeting the venerable Algerian General Ahmed Gaid Salah said, “We must shoulder our responsibilities and respect our commitment and the initiation of the actual work on the ground.” He then pointed out that Algeria had organized the meeting in order to “explore areas of co-operation” and to upgrade them “to a more mature level, as well as to clarify all the circumstances that still exist, such as paving the way for effective action, and thus achieve the objectives underlined in the strategy to combat terrorism and organized crime.” I doubt that leaves Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb quaking in their boots.