{"id":13416,"date":"2016-03-22T03:00:44","date_gmt":"2016-03-22T08:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=13416"},"modified":"2016-03-22T03:00:44","modified_gmt":"2016-03-22T08:00:44","slug":"crusader-corner-the-spreading-cancer-of-islam-in-west-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/22\/crusader-corner-the-spreading-cancer-of-islam-in-west-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Crusader Corner: The Spreading Cancer of Islam in West Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SANTA,<\/p>\n

C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire has become the latest country in West Africa to suffer a major terror attack. No fewer than 15 civilians and three special forces troops died<\/a> when six attackers opened fire on the beaches in Grand-Bassam, a seaside town that\u2019s popular with expats.<\/p>\n

Thirty-three people were wounded.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility<\/a>. The Grand-Bassam assault is the latest in long string of attacks linked to Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Far from beaten, the terror group is spreading across West Africa.<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

On Jan. 15, gunmen opened fire<\/a> in central Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. And on Nov. 20 last year, a similar attack took place at the Radisson Blue Hotel in Mali\u2019s capital Bamako. AQIM and various linked groups have also claimed many smaller attacks, mostly in Mali.<\/p>\n

Jihadi groups have operated in Mali and neighboring countries for decades. AQIM, West Africa\u2019s local Al Qaeda branch, actually evolved from an Algerian terror group. In 2012, AQIM and associated groups were instrumental in the Islamist takeover of northern Mali, which prompted a French military intervention in 2013.<\/p>\n

In contrast to Islamic State,\u00a0Al Qaeda has always been a decentralized organization. AQIM and its affiliates are a perfect example of this.<\/p>\n

AQIM is the \u201cofficial\u201d Al Qaeda franchise in the region, but it tolerates the existence of several other semi-autonomous terror groups within its sphere of influence \u2014 and in some cases AQIM purportedly facilitated their creation.<\/p>\n

Case in point \u2014 the Macina Liberation Front<\/a>, which took responsibility for the Radisson Blue attack. Officially dedicated<\/a> to recreating the Macina Empire<\/a>, the group is widely believed to be a local front for AQIM. Its leader Hamadou Kouffa has reportedly had great success in mobilizing members of his Pheul\/Fulani community.<\/p>\n

Another associated group, Ansar Dine<\/a>\u00a0is led by Ihad ag Ghali, a Tuareg with a long history of resistance against the Malian state. AQIM has also managed to survive several defections and splinter movements, the most prominent being that of Mokthar Belmokthar<\/a>. Wrongly proclaimed dead\u00a0on several occasions<\/a>, Belmokthar is widely considered to be one of the region\u2019s top terrorist masterminds, with an astonishing number of complex attacks to his credit.<\/p>\n

<\/h6>\n

That AQIM and its affiliates have now conducted two high-profile attacks outside Mali within a short period of time is interesting and worrying at the same time \u2014 and flies in the face of French efforts to deny terrorist groups the freedom to operate in the region. It almost certainly means that the group\u2019s leadership judges itself to be strong and unified enough to handle the risks and demands associated with striking beyond its traditional area of operations.<\/p>\n

Neither Burkina Faso nor C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire has a significant local jihadi scene nor even great sympathy for AQIM\u2019s cause among the population.<\/p>\n

C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, a former French colony and home to one of the major deepwater ports in francophone West Africa, is a major logistical hub for France\u2019s military. The rapid intervention in Mali in 2013 was possible only\u00a0because French forces were already prepositioned in neighboring C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One attack won\u2019t deny France this advantage, of course. But again in contrast to Islamic State, Al Qaeda\u2019s ideology isn\u2019t primarily geared towards holding territory.\u00a0While both groups want to reestablish the Caliphate \u2014 and Islamic State has claimed to have done so \u2014 Al Qaeda sees this as a\u00a0long-term goal, attainable only after a struggle of a century or more.<\/p>\n

In that sense, the recent spate of attacks in West Africa is aimed at exhausting France, the main Western enemy of the Islamists in this particular theater. Without a doubt, AQIM\u2019s leadership is banking on Paris doubling down on its military and diplomatic commitment to the region, thereby opening its military and citizens to even more attacks.<\/p>\n

\"\"France won\u2019t take this lying down, of course, and its special forces have been quite successful<\/a> in eliminating Islamist fighters and leaders throughout the Sahel. But the military approach to combating terrorism has limits, as the United States has discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, so far France has refused to reconsider its approach to its former colonies.<\/p>\n

After Ougadougou and Grand-Bassam, one doesn\u2019t have to be a fortune-teller to predict more attacks against French interests in the region. The most likely targets are Niamey, France\u2019s main military hub in Mali\u2019s neighbor Niger \u2014 and Dakar, the capital of Senegal and a major economic and political hotspot in the region which is also home to many French nationals. Other high-profile targets could include Chad\u2019s capital N\u2019Djamena and\u00a0the government of Mauritania.<\/p>\n

While France lost four citizens in Grand-Bassam, the majority of the victims were, of course, Ivoirian<\/a>. Destabilizing the politics and economies<\/a>of West Africa is beneficial to AQIM, as it relies on weak governments and badly-governed spaces to operate. But France\u2019s intervention in Mali shows that to achieve the complete collapse of order in one of these states, AQIM first needs to eliminate the presence of France and other major powers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire has become the latest country in West Africa to suffer a major terror attack. No fewer than 15 civilians and three special forces troops died when six attackers opened fire on the beaches in Grand-Bassam, a seaside town that\u2019s popular with expats. Thirty-three people were wounded. \u00a0Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2711,5418,1583,1704,5072,2574,2004,1286,272],"tags":[10465,10466,1252,10467,8007,3911,10468,3913],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}