COUNTRY ANALYSIS
Samantha Rubinsztejn analyses the CBRN threat in the world’s second-largest continent
Africa’s traditional corruption, internal confl icts and porous borders have opened the continent’s doors to radical Islamist militants.
T
he French SERVAL ground operation launched in January 2013 against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Mali has revealed their new military capabilities: large and complex networks of weapon caches in caves and hangars, weapons
manufacturing units, and safe houses. According to the French Army Chief of Staff , Edouard Guillaud, these fi ndings validate prior intelligence that described Mali as a new centre for the organization of industrial terrorism with the goal of reaching the entire African continent. Given al-Qaeda’s will to acquire CBRN capabilities, we may
also ask if African radical Islamist organizations such as AQIM will be interested in acquiring CBRN weapons – and for what purposes.
Jihadist patchwork AQIM is defi ned as the main terrorist threat in Africa mainly because of its past experience in insurgency. AQIM has evolved from the Salafi st Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a splinter group of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) that was responsible for the Algerian Civil War in the 1990s. AQIM has carried out a series of attacks in the Maghreb, such as the bombing attack in Morocco in April 2011, and in the Sahel region – predominantly hostage-taking attacks in Algeria, Niger, Mauritania and Mali. AQIM is, however, just one major node of a much larger
patchwork of radical Islamist organizations active in Africa. Several radical Islamist groups have been proliferating and cooperating with varying degrees of affi nity to AQIM’s agenda – mostly to acquire expertise, weapons, training and funding. For instance, terrorist groups have currently shown a small degree of cooperation with al-Qaeda in Nigeria and Somalia.
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Nigeria is fi ghting the Boko Haram group on its northern border while Somalia faces the major threat of the radical al-Shabaab militia. Moroccan jihadist groups such as Ansar al-Sharia are also affi liated with al-Qaeda.
AQIM expansion In January 2012, AQIM operational theatres expanded from the Kabylie Mountains in Northeastern Algeria and from Libya to the Sahel, in particular Northern Mali – thanks to strategic partnerships with the Islamic groups Ansar Eddine, Movement for Jihad and Unity in West Africa (MJUWA), and the secular rebel Tuareg group, the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA), which seeks independence of north Mali. Throughout 2012 this network reached Northern Mali’s major cities of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. Meanwhile, AQIM and its radical Islamist allies supplanted the Tuareg rebellion and decided to pursue their conquest to the central part of Mali. In January 2013 they invaded the city of Konna, which led to the French
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