They know it in Paris, Rome and Madrid. There is a big security hole to the south of Europe, the existence of which is confirmed by ongoing hostage crises involving citizens from France, Italy and Spain. The hostages are being held by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which has celebrated its third anniversary with a wave of kidnappings, including the seizure of three Spanish NGO volunteers who were, perhaps foolhardily, driving their convoy of aid through Mauritania. AQIM, the result of a merger between the Algerian terrorist organization the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat and Al-Qaeda, has quickly become a pan-regional network, attracting young, radicalized Islamists from as far afield as Nigeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya.
Algeria, which has managed to temper the blaze of deadly bombings that marked the launch of the organization, including the April 2007 attack against the United Nations building in Algiers, complains that the paying of ransoms by Western governments only makes the task of stamping out the terrorists more difficult. According to security analysts, the sum of ransoms paid to AQIM in 2009 amounted to around $14 million, with one British hostage being killed after the government in London refused to negotiate terms. For its part, Mali has complained that there are Algerian-led Salafists operating in its territory, which is where the current batch of hostages is being held, with the authorities in Bamako wondering what it can do about all this with an army just 7,500 strong.
But kidnapping is not AQIM’s only source of income. It is apparently engaged in a far more reliable and lucrative trade, that in drug trafficking, which has been impossible to shut down. Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told the Security Council last December: “We have evidence that flows of illicit drugs – heroin brought through East Africa and cocaine through the west – meet in the Sahara and follow routes through Chad, Niger and Mali. Terrorists and antigovernment forces feed off this trafficking.”
During the same month, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) announced the arrest of three men whose statements under interrogation appeared to prove a working relationship between Colombia’s narco-terrorist insurgency, the FARC, and AQIM. According to the DEA, one of the three detained on drug-related and terrorist charges, Harouna Touré, “stated that Al-Qaeda would protect the FARC’s cocaine shipment from Mali through North Africa and into Morocco en route into Spain.”
The DEA concurred with other analysts of the cocaine industry when it noted that increased vigilance was necessary over the maritime routes into southern Europe, especially Spain, Portugal and their Atlantic archipelagos. The reason was that West Africa was turning into a hub for the supply of drugs to the European market, thanks to “an unholy alliance between South American narco-terrorists and Islamic extremists,” as Jay Bergman, the DEA’s director for the Andean region, put it.
Another of the three suspects, Idriss Abdul Rahman, told the DEA of “the shared goals” between the Al-Qaeda and the FARC, saying that they were both “committed to the same anti-American cause.”
So who can the Western authorities call upon to take the lead in eradicating armed extremism from the desert wastes of the Sahara and the Sahel? There are two powerful armies in the region, Algeria’s and Morocco’s, but their governments do not talk. Instead, Algeria seems to want to remain at the dead center of all efforts to deal with the threat from AQIM, at the expense of Morocco. Frustratingly, this is because the unresolved dispute over the Western Sahara – an issue stemming from the colonial era – continues to poison relations in the Maghreb.
For example, Algeria recently helped its southern neighbor Mali to put down a Tuareg revolt, and has held meetings with Mali, Mauritania and Niger to coordinate military activity to thwart the terrorists in their desert areas. But Morocco was not invited, and neither were US representatives, despite Washington’s standing offer to provide military and logistical expertise and equipment to fight AQIM. However, Algiers is reported to be willing to accept US collaboration in its plan to create an electronic barrier along its borders with Mauritania, Niger and Mali to disrupt the freedom of movement enjoyed by the estimated 300 AQIM operatives.
As for Europe, the AQIM threat has drawn feverish reactions from governments when their citizens have been abducted, but otherwise the issue has not received a great deal of public attention. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s first high representative for foreign policy under the new Treaty of Lisbon, has so far pronounced on the situations in Iran, Haiti and Sri Lanka, among others, but there is as yet no sign of an initiative concerning European security along its exposed southern flank.
James Badcock is editor of the English edition of the Spanish daily El Pais. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
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