The Hsida mosque stands at the edge of the slum of Jamia Mezouak, where the hillside plunges into a valley whose opposite face is peppered with gravestones. It’s a bleak scene, yet some of the jobless people inhabiting the crumbling houses nearby say they have cause for hope — faith in God and allegiance to Osama bin Laden.
Al-Qaeda’s influence is spreading into the cities and deserts of North Africa. Increasingly, Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians who have known only poverty, corruption and police crackdowns are answering extremist Islam’s call to remake the world — with violence, if need be.
Jamia Mezouak, a dingy outer layer of the northern Moroccan city of Tetouan, has symbolised this expansion since an al-Qaeda-linked group centred on the Hsida mosque recruited two young residents for suicide bombings in Baqouba, Iraq, last October, police say.
And now al-Qaeda has an official presence next door in Algeria: the Salafist Group of Call and Combat (GSPC) is calling itself ”al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa”.
This leaves the governments of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia caught between official allegiance to the United States-led war against terrorism and grassroots extremism. And experts say it puts nearby southern Europe increasingly at risk of terror attacks.
Times a-changing
The 43-million people in north-west Africa are mostly moderate Muslims, and largely poor — despite Algeria’s oil riches and thriving tourism industries in Morocco and Tunisia. The three nations’ governments brook little dissent, and tough national security measures initially prevented al-Qaeda from establishing itself in the region.
Now all that is changing.
”Al-Qaeda can now penetrate the Sahara and Sahel area,” says Fernando Reinares, an international terrorism analyst at Madrid’s Elcano Institute, referring to the wide band of sub-Saharan scrub country running from Senegal to Ethiopia.
Since al-Qaeda’s rise, security experts have worried that the Sahara’s wide open spaces and porous borders make it a haven for terrorist groups, the way Afghanistan’s deserts have harboured Islamic militants.
The US has responded with projects like a counterterrorism force known as the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, which uses military training, humanitarian aid and intelligence operations to try to keep nations in that region from becoming terrorist havens.
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia are part of another US project, the Trans-Sahara Partnership, under which African countries work with US forces to prevent the spread of terrorism and receive advice and assistance from the US. Earlier this week, US President George Bush announced that the Pentagon will set up a new command in Africa to oversee its operations there.
Al-Qaeda link
The GSPC connection is al-Qaeda’s first acknowledged presence in north-west Africa.
The Algerian group shares al-Qaeda’s ideology and international agenda. Although whittled down to a few hundred members, the GSPC still carries out regular bomb attacks in Algeria and raises funds in Europe for al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq.
The GSPC enjoys relations with Moroccan terrorists responsible for the 2004 Madrid bombings, says Mohamed Darif, a terrorism analyst at Morocco’s Mohammedia University. Jamal Ahmidan, a suspect in the bombings who lived beside the Hsida Mosque in Tetouan, died in a suicide blast during a subsequent stand-off with Spanish police in Madrid.
The GSPC is coordinating increasingly with jihadists around North Africa, as shown by high-profile GSPC-linked arrests and attacks recently in neighbouring countries.
In late December, Moroccan police rounded up 26 people from Jamia Mezouak and nearby towns accused of forming a GSPC-linked cell attempting to recruit fighters for the Iraq insurgency.
Last month, normally placid Tunisia was rattled by a deadly shootout between police and Islamist gunmen tied to the GSPC and apparently planning to attack foreign diplomats.
Meanwhile, in Algeria in December, the GSPC staged a daring bomb attack on buses carrying foreign workers of an affiliate of US energy services giant Halliburton, killing an Algerian bus driver and wounding nine others.
”The GSPC has become more committed to targeting Westerners, including civilians, and to mobilising recruits for Iraq,” says Reinares, adding that the group is a danger to southern Europe as well as North Africa.
Spanish police recently arrested an alleged terror recruiter working in Spain for al-Qaeda and the GSPC. Both groups have repeatedly threatened France.
Resentment
North African jihadists can exploit resentment among the region’s poor.
”The king and the government give us only poverty and jails,” says one Jamia Mezouak resident who asked not to be named because he fears the police. He says he considers the rule of Morocco’s King Mohamed VI illegitimate.
Tetouan, a jumble of whitewashed houses and Spanish colonial-style plazas, lies a stone’s throw from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. It survives on smuggling, says Jamaleddine Laamarti, the local head of the Moroccan Human Rights Association.
”There’s a lot of unemployment and people struggle to get by,” says Laamarti. ”Many of these people are drinking their coffee on credit,” he adds, motioning to the evening crowds filling Tetouan’s downtown cafés.
But while many North Africans are poor, only a handful become terrorists. This, plus the fact that suspects have come both from North Africa’s slums and Muslim communities in comfortable Western Europe, ”points to the key role played by ideological indoctrination”, says Reinares.
Most North Africa jihadists follow the traditionalist current in Islam known as Salafism, which has spread across the region from the Middle East in recent decades. Salafis adhere to what they deem the pure Islam of the Prophet Muhammad’s early followers, supporting Islamic government and shunning non-Islamic ways and values.
Abderrahim Mouhtad, president of the an-Naseer Association, which defends arrested Moroccan Salafis, says that while most Salafis are peaceful, austere Salafist thinking can end with an embrace of violent jihad as a religious duty.
For some, that means struggling to overthrow their home governments. Others are inspired to make the journey to martyrdom in the Middle East.
”It’s the duty of all Muslims to fight the Americans in Iraq,” says the Jamia Mezouak resident. ”This is a world war.” — Sapa-AP