Foreign Relations
If nothing else, the attack by the ‘Masked Men Brigade’ of AQMI’s Saharan branch[5] on the Tiguentourine gas facility at In Amenas on Jan. 16, planned as much as two months in advance according to the group’s chief Mokhtar Belmokhtar, is indicative of the organisation’s acute sense of strategy.
The In Amenas raid must be seen in the context of the ongoing struggle south of the border between AQMI and its allies on the one hand and the French military and what remains of the Malian state on the other. The French intervention was triggered by the surprise offensive on Jan. 10 by the armed islamist groups in northern Mali against the town of Konna, just south of the unofficial demarcation line between the territory they conquered in early 2012 and the territory still under the control of the central government; Paris has argued that the attack on Konna was a prelude to a swoop on Bamako that would have opened the way to the establishment of an islamist emirate in the whole of Mali. However, the jihadist groups that had managed with a force of a few thousand men to hold the north of the country for almost a year would have had great difficulty establishing firm control over Bamako (population 2 million) and Mali’s other cities, which are largely hostile to them[6], and it seems likely that AQMI and its allies were aware of this and never had the conquest of Bamako as their real objective. Rather, their surprise southwards push to Konna seems to have been designed to provoke precisely the reaction that it got: the open intervention of the French military. By drawing in the French – rather than obediently waiting for Paris, working through the United Nations, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States, put together a West African proxy force – the jihadists would have been seeking to recast their fight as a confrontation between the defenders of Islam and an invading ‘infidel’, Western, imperialist army. Neither should the rapid success of the French army’s Operation Serval be taken as a sign that AQMI and its allies were taken by surprise, or even that they have been vanquished; rather, in virtually all areas, the jihadist groups appear to have carried out an orderly tactical retreat, deliberately avoiding engaging the advancing French and Malian forces and minimising their losses. Having learned the lessons of Iraq and in particular Afghanistan, their subsequent strategy is likely to be to launch an insurgency, using hit-and-run guerilla tactics, once the occupying force is in place[7].
The In Amenas operation was an extension of this strategy insofar as it seems to have been intended, like the offensive against Konna, to clarify matters: in striking at an element of Algeria’s critical infrastructure, AQMI would have anticipated a very tough response from the Algerian security forces; by targeting a plant that is jointly operated by European oil companies, with large numbers of expat workers present on site – rather than an easier target such as, for example, the network of oil and gas pipelines that criss-cross the Algerian Sahara – it ensured that Algiers would be clearly seen as colluding with “the West”. Plans for the operation were, by Belmokhtar’s own account, first hatched some two months in advance – i.e. in the wake of UN Security Council Resolution 2071 calling on member states, regional and international organisations to provide support for efforts to combat AQMI and its allies in northern Mali. For those plans to have been carried through when they were, AQMI would have to have been convinced that Algeria was – contrary to the Algerian government’s official position – providing support in one form or another for the French military campaign, since to have launched such an attack on Algeria while it was observing strict neutrality would clearly have been counterproductive. Beyond granting the French air force overflight rights, one key way in which Algeria can discreetly provide assistance to the French war effort in northern Mali is to crack down more effectively on the smuggling of the fuel which is essential to the jihadists’ mobility and which mostly comes from Algeria, and it would seem that a commitment to do just that was made at the meeting of the Algerian, Tunisian and Libyan prime ministers in Ghadames, Libya on Jan. 12. Indeed, a senior civil servant at the Algerian Presidency has confirmed to us that Algeria had resolved a few days before the Ghadames border security summit to establish full control over the so-called ‘Salvador triangle’ – an area straddling the borders of Algeria, Libya and Niger that has long been a crucial passageway for smugglers of all types, and which had taken on special importance for AQMI and its allies in the Sahara for channelling weapons from Libya and, no doubt, fuel from Algeria; the same source indicated that Algiers considers the In Amenas raid to be a form of retaliation for such moves.
Initially, AQMI’s offensives – against Konna in Mali, and against the gas facility at In Amenas – put Algiers on the back foot. The fact that it was Ansar Dine – the Tuareg islamist faction with which Algiers had brokered negotiations in the hope of breaking the jihadist front and obviating or at least minimising any armed intervention – that led the attack on Konna came as a shock to Algiers, compromising its entire strategy for dealing with the Mali crisis. Speaking to us a fortnight later, an advisor at the Presidency spoke of the Algerian leadership’s alarm that it is losing all vestige of the control it used to have over events across its southern borders, which is increasingly tinted with concern that this may steadily develop into a loss of control over Algeria’s own desert south. As the French military intervention got under way, the announcement by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius that air raids on jihadist strongholds in northern Mali had been made possible by Algiers’ decision to grant the French Air Force the right to overfly its territory came as a considerable embarrassment to Bouteflika and the regime as a whole, who were lambasted by critics at home for collaborating with the armed forces of the former colonial power[8]. Finally, the siege of In Amenas and the uncompromising military assault to dislodge the armed islamists and retake the facility before they could blow it up momentarily exposed Algeria’s relations with the governments of those countries with significant numbers of nationals on the site – in particular the United Kingdom and Japan – to severe strain.
Any tension with Western countries has dissipated remarkably quickly, however. UK Prime Minister David Cameron jetted in to Algiers on Jan. 30 – the first ever visit to Algeria by a British head of government – with his National Security Advisor Sir Kim Darroch and MI6 chief Sir John Sawers in tow, and proceeded, according to an advisor at the Presidency, to bend over backwards to persuade his hosts to forget his initial “over-reaction” to the Algerian military intervention at In Amenas, blaming it on a lack of information. By the end of the British PM’s visit, agreement had been reached on a “strategic security partnership” between the two countries, built around consultations between senior military, security and intelligence advisers co-chaired by Darroch and his Algerian counterpart Kamal Rezzag-Bara. For his part, France’s President François Hollande – who had carefully avoided criticising the Algerian response to In Amenas in the heat of the moment – went still further, strenuously defending the Algerian government’s fight against terrorism in remarks to the European Parliament on Feb. 5; this has been greeted with immense satisfaction by Algerian media close to the government, which has contrasted Hollande’s supportive stance to the disdainful, hands-off attitude shown by his Socialist predecessors towards the Algerian regime at the height of the troubles in the 1990s. Cameron, Hollande and other Western leaders have explicitly recognised the importance of Algeria to any solution to the security problems of the Sahara-Sahel region[9].
Meanwhile Algiers, although it has been shown to be collaborating to some degree with the West against the jihadists in northern Mali, has stuck to its line of no foreign troops on Algerian soil and no Algerian troops on foreign soil (as restated by PM Sellal during the annual African Union summit in Addis Ababa towards the end of January), and even finds itself in a position to try to extract some positive advantage from the situation, both politically and practically. On the political level, “senior officials” quoted by the New York Times[10], for example, have been quick to put out the kind of message Algiers wishes to be heard in Washington: that the In Amenas incident is directly connected to last September’s attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi[11], and that such damage to Western interests is the direct consequence of the Arab Spring uprisings with which Washington and other Western capitals have expressed sympathy[12]. And in practical terms, the Algerian regime now seems to be attempting to transform the respect, however grudging, that it has won for its uncompromising stance towards the attackers of In Amenas into agreements on arms and security technology transfers: the army is reported to be pressing ahead with plans to acquire American or French-made mine resistant ambush protected-all terrain vehicles, while Bouteflika is believed to have discussed with David Cameron the possible use of satellites in securing Algeria’s borders and to have received a pledge from the British PM that he would support security plans for border with Mali which include the acquisition by Algiers of American-made UAVs – although it is not clear whether Cameron will go all the way and lobby for Algiers to be allowed to buy the MQ-9 Reaper killer drones on which it seems to have its heart set.
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