African securityNew terrorist faction threatening U.S. interests in the Sahel

The State Department on Wednesday warned that a new terrorist group linked to an Algerian militant is now posing “the greatest near-term threat to U.S. and Western interests” in the Sahel region of Africa.

Analysts agree with the State Department’s assessment. “We are seeing a dangerous mutation of the threat,” said Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism at Georgetown University. “Splinters can become even more consequential than their parent organization.”

The New York Times reports that U.S. is concerned with Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian militant who has been conducting terrorist operations in the Sahel region for a while. The Sahel is vast, sparsely populated desert area on the southern reaches of Sahara desert, stretching from Senegal in the west to Chad in the east.

Belmokhtar, known as Laaouar (or the one-eyed, after losing an eye to shrapnel), hones his fighting skills in Afghanistan in the 1980s, where he joined other devout Muslims in fighting the Soviet occupation of the country.

He returned to Algeria in the early 1990s to take part in the 10-year civil war which erupted in 1992 after the Algerian military cancelled an election which appeared to be giving a majority to Islamist parties.

After the Algerian military defeated the Islamists, Belmokhtar and some of his followers escaped to Mali, where they embarked on a campaign of smuggling and kidnapping for ransom, which filled the group’s coffers.

Toward the end of the decade, Belmokhtar emerged as the leading figure in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), but in 2012 he split with the group to create the Al Mulathameen Battalion, which on Wednesday was officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.

“The finding reflects the fact that the terrorist groups in the region are in flux, although certain individuals remain constant,” Michael Shurkin, a former CIA analyst who is now at the RAND Corporation, told the Times.

With his own group, and with ties to al Qaeda more tenuous, Belmokhtar embarked on a series of daring operations aimed to undermine the U.S. and Western interests.

“He is a more adventurous, perhaps even more reckless operator than the AQIM leadership has shown itself to be,” Daniel Benjamin, the former senior counterterrorism official at the State Department who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College, told the Times. “And that translates into a threat.”

In January this year Belmokhtar’s group attacked a gas plant in Algeria which resulted in the death of thirty-eight civilians, including three Americans. Four months later, his group joined with a Western African terrorist faction — the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa — to carry out attacks in Niger that killed at least twenty people.

In August Belmokhtar’s group and the West African faction announced that they were uniting to create another group, called Al Murabitoun.

The State Department on Wednesday said that the new terrorist group “concerns us more than any in the region.”

The West African in January was behind the push of Islamists from north Mali toward the Mali capital of Bamako, a push which led to a French military intervention which, in February, ousted the Islamists from north Mali.

The Times notes that the Obama administration has not always seemed to be of one mind on how aggressively to pursue Belmokhtar, especially when it came to employing the U.S. military or providing intelligence to Algeria or other nations in the region to allow them to take military action.