African securityAl-Qaeda-affiliated West African terrorist group threatens France over Mali intervention

GMA fighters in jihadi photo op // Source: alquds.com

A terror group active in West Africa has threatened it would target the interests of “France and her allies” in retaliation for France’s military intervention in Mali last year. The threat was posted on a Mauritanian Web which local jihadists often use to communicate with the outside world.

Le Matin reports that the threat was posted Saturday by the Mourabitounes group, according to the Nouakchott Information Agency (ANI). The posting offered details of terrorist operations carried out by the group last year, including attacks in Niger and Mali, and the killing of foreign hostages at a natural gas plant in southeastern Algeria.

The Mourabitounes group – its full name is Groupe des Mourabitounes de l’Azawad (GMA) — was formed in August, when veteran terrorist Mokhtar Belmokhtar officially joined forces with the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (Mouvement pour l’unicité et le jihad en Afrique de l’Ouest [MUJAO]), a radical al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group that once controlled part of northern Mali and has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in the Gao region since France intervened.

In a statement last month designating the Mourabitounes group as a foreign terrorist organization, the U.S. State Department said it “constitutes the greatest near-term threat to U.S. and Western interests” in Africa’s Sahel region (see “New terrorist faction threatening U.S. interests in the Sahel,” HSNW, 20 December 2013).

In April 2012, north Mali was taken over by the Islamist groups Ansar Dine, which declared the area under its control as the independent country of Azawad. In early January 2013 the Islamists began moving south in an effort to extend their control over the whole of Mali. This prompted a French military intervention, which evicted the Islamists from north Mali after a few weeks of fighting, allowing for the reunification of the country.

At the end of January 2013, in retaliation for the French intervention, Belmoktar staged a spectacular attack on a French-operated natural gas facility at Ain Amenas, near the border between Algeria and Libya. Dozens of his followers seized the sprawling facility, taking hundreds hostage. After a tense 3-day stand-off, the Algerian military attacked the terrorists, killing most of the militants. Some criticized the Algerian military’s operation as heavy-handed. Forty hostages were killed in the standoff, including three Americans. Seven Americans managed to escape unharmed.

CTV News notes that more recently, Belmokhtar and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa claimed joint responsibility in May for attacks in Niger. Suicide bombers detonated two car bombs simultaneously there, one inside a military camp in the city of Agadez and another in the remote town of Arlit at a French-operated uranium mine, killing a total of twenty-six people and wounding dozens.

The Saturday message from the Mourabitounes group accuses France of killing “peaceful children, women and old men” during its eary-2013 operations in northern Mali.

“Les moujahidines ne resteront pas bras croisés devant cette situation, même si, aujourd’hui, la voix de l’injustice domine, chacun à son tour” (“The mujahedeen will not rest with arms crossed facing this situation, even if, today, the voice of injustice prevails, each in its turn”) the ANI Web site quotes the message as saying.