Intelligence agencies and security experts are divided over events in Algeria: one view is that the violence of recent years is the work of the homegrown GSPC (the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat), still fighting the civil war that tore the country apart and killed thousands in the 1990s. The other is that it is part of an international jihadist network run, or at least inspired, by al-Qaeda. The two theories may not be mutually exclusive.
The GSPC announced in September last year it was changing its name to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and was embraced as a new recruit by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy. Some analysts suspect a branding exercise. ”Algerian authorities consider the shift to be a last-ditch attempt to revitalise a domestic insurgent movement enfeebled by years of combat and internal divisions,” the Council for Foreign Relations says. ”The Algerian state, however, has been known to suppress reporting on the real strength of insurgent groups.”
But the former French colony, which became independent in 1962 after a bloody eight-year war, has often seen its sons fight abroad. Algerians flocked to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and returned home to fight the secular military regime after it cancelled elections an Islamist party was poised to win. Intelligence gathered by United States forces in Iraq shows Algerians, along with Libyans, Moroccans and Tunisians, well represented among foreign jihadis joining the Iraqi insurgency over the past year, providing many suicide bombers.
”Of course there is a general branding of trans-national violence that is called al-Qaeda,” says George Joffe, a Maghreb expert at Cambridge University. ”Just as we want to label it that, so the people who are engaged in it are prepared to accept it — it’s a mirror image. But this is Algeria-based. The danger is of falling into the American view of the ‘war on terror’ and ignoring local factors. The talk of al-Qaeda is just window dressing, just talk.”
He sees the increased violence as the result of a split in the GSPC and plays down suggestions of coordinated activity linking jihadists across the region.
The Salafists (fundamentalists) emerged from the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in 1998, believing the GIA’s brutal tactics were damaging the Islamist cause. The GSPC gained support by vowing to avoid indiscriminate killing of civilians, becoming the primary force for Islamism in Algeria. The majority of its members refused government offers of amnesty.
In 2005 Algerians figured in a number of United Kingdom criminal cases, including the so-called Ricin trial to spread poison across London, though only one man was convicted and seven were acquitted. — Â