by Dore Gold
Not long after the
French offensive against African jihadists in Mali got underway, a
leader of one of the offshoots of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)
declared that his organization would "strike at the heart of France."
AQIM attacked French embassies and most recently a gas facility in
Algeria, where it took hostages. But was it ready to move its war
against the West to the territories of the European states as well and
thus pose a real threat to their security?
The fact is that for
some time European leaders have been looking at the growth of al-Qaida
in North Africa with real concern. After Islamist extremists took
control of northern Mali last year, converting it into a terrorist
sanctuary, EU heads of state met in Oct. 2012, and issued a statement
characterizing the crisis in Mali as "an immediate threat" to Europe
itself. French President Francois Hollande said he believed that AQIM
was planning to use Mali as a launching pad for an attack on French
soil. This month German Chancellor Angela Merkel added her voice to this
view of the crisis in Mali, saying that "terrorism in Mali, or in the
north of Mali, is a threat not just to Africa but also to Europe."
French intelligence
experts have traced the rise of jihadist forces in Mali and the rest of
North Africa. Apparently, Pakistani and Afghan preachers began arriving
in 2002-3 in Mali and Niger along with international jihadists who fled
Afghanistan after the U.S. intervention drove them out. In other words,
the rise of jihadist elements in these African countries was not just a
local phenomenon, but rather linked to the original al-Qaida network.
By 2007, al-Qaida in
the Islamic Maghreb was formed from an extremist offshoot of the Groupe
Islamique Armee (GIA) that had fought in the Algerian Civil War in the
1990s. In March 2012, jihadist forces took over the northern two-thirds
of Mali, converting it into a new African Afghanistan. Since 2009, the
growing jihadi presence in West Africa spilled over into Mali's
neighbor, Niger, which also happens to be the sixth largest producer of
uranium ore in the world.
The idea of launching
attacks against the West was already proposed by the forerunners of
AQIM. On Dec. 24, 1994, four terrorists from the GIA hijacked an Air
France airbus that took off from Algiers and was bound for Paris. In
what looked like a rehearsal for 9/11 (there was no connection between
the two events) their plan was to use the French aircraft as a missile
and crash it into the Eiffel Tower with all the passengers on board.
French gendarme stormed the aircraft in Marseilles and eliminated the
GIA team. In 1995, GIA killed eight people and injured 100 in a bomb
attack on the Paris Metro.
The idea that radical
Islamic organizations seek to target the West should not come as a
surprise. It has been a prevalent theme in their writings, especially in
the Muslim Brotherhood from which many of the leaders of al-Qaida
emerged. Hassan al-Bana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood wrote
that after the establishment of the Islamic state in Egypt, the struggle
against the West must continue: "We will not stop at this point, but
will pursue this evil force to its own lands, invade its Western
heartland ..." In the same way, Muhammad Akef, the former Supreme Guide
of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood declared in 2004 his "complete faith
that Islam will invade Europe and America." Western apologists often
ignore these hard-line positions, but they undoubtedly influenced the
political education of younger generations of jihadists, who later
operationalized them.
The U.S. has not seen
the new North African threat as intensely as the Europeans. The New York
Times ran a story on Jan. 18 entitled "U.S. Sees Hazy Threat from Mali
Militants." The newspaper reported that during Congressional testimony
last June a State Department official played down the threat from what
was happening in Mali, saying that AQIM "has not threatened to attack
the U.S. homeland." Another view, coming out of the Pentagon, points to
the role of AQIM in the attack on the American diplomatic compound in
Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed, including the U.S.
ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens.
Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton put forward a more urgent view of recent developments in
North Africa during testimony before Congressional committees on Jan.
23 when she said: "... the instability in Mali has created an expanding
safe haven for terrorists who look to extend their influence and plot
further attacks of the kind we just saw last week in Algeria."
That a new region-wide
threat is emerging was underscored by the report by Algeria's prime
minister, Abdelmalik Sellal, who said that the seizure of hostages at
the Algerian gas plant appears to have been conducted by terrorists who
crossed into Algeria from Northern Mali. There are also indications now
that this operation received logistical support from Islamist militias
in eastern Libya. It is only a short leap from the emergence of a new
region-wide al-Qaida infrastructure in North Africa, that crosses
international borders, to a direct threat to Europe itself. Apparently,
France already understands that this is what is at stake, but it is not
fully appreciated that widely.
The difficult point
that Western analysts just do not understand is the blind hatred of the
West as a whole among all the jihadist organizations, associated with
al-Qaida. Many times in Europe it is hoped that by taking a more
critical position against Israel, European diplomats can lower the
flames of radical Islamic rage against them. But these policies simply
don't work because the jihadists' readiness to attack the West comes
from a desire to eradicate Western civilization and not from the
pronouncements of Catherine Ashton or any other senior European official
either for or against Israel.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3313
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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