Sahel: Al-Qaeda and the "business" of Western hostages

DAKAR - For Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), always menacing but in financial difficulty, the kidnapping of Westerners in the Sahel countries constitutes increasingly a "business" to bail out, according to experts.

•    In less than a week, a French has been kidnapped in north-eastern Mali and three Spaniards captured in northern Mauritania: two actions usually attributed to the jihadist movement, even if they have not yet been claimed.
  
     The abductions have "multiplied in recent months, the degradation is continuous for over five years," said Alain Antil, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI) in Paris.
  
     "Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) needs money, hostages can become a business. Other groups may kidnap Westerners to them. We have the impression that it becomes a business in the area" he added.
  
     The North African branch of Al-Qaeda has "serious financial problems. And with these kidnappings, there is a will to solve these problems," confirms Jean-Pierre Filiu, Professor at the “Institut d'Etudes Politiques” (Institute of Political Studies) of Paris and an expert on Al Qaeda.
  
     And "it is precisely when it is experiencing difficulties that it becomes dangerous," said the author of "Nine Lives of Al-Qaeda".
  
     In the past, the Western hostages are usually freed after ransom payments, even if the governments involved did not report financial transactions, and sometimes, perhaps in exchange for Islamist fighters detained.
  
     In June, AQIM has announced, however, for the first time, murdering a British hostage in the wake of London's refusal to cede to blackmail by Islamists.
  
     The organization is strangled financially, especially in Algeria, and is unable to achieve its goals of recruitment, had said in mid-November before the U.S. Congress, the coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department Daniel Benjamin.
  
     For his part, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has called in September at the General Assembly of the United Nations for "the absolute prohibition of payment of ransom to kidnappers who has achieved in recent years, an alarming trend".
  
     According to him, "the product of the ransom turned out to be, now the main source of financing of terrorism."
  
     Moreover, AQMI’s financial difficulties occur when the traffic of South American cocaine is increasing, as evidenced by the case of the Boeing filled with cocaine and other illicit substances," according to the UN, which landed early November in northern Mali, coming from Venezuela.
  
     Specialists in anti-drug fight fear collusion between the various traffic passing through the Sahel and the Islamist networks that may have common intermediates.
  
     Another cause for anxiety, France, whose four citizens were killed in late 2007 in Mauritania, is increasingly targeted.
  
     "The pressure is much stronger since last summer, when the number two Al-Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahiri lashed out on August 4th against France for its hostility to the Islamic headscarf, says Professor Filiu.
  
     "He then accused France of being the eternal enemy of Islam, he says, and days later there was a terrorist act (of a young Mauritanian bomber who blew himself up, editor's note) near the Embassy of France in Nouakchott.
  
      
  Ennaharonline/ M. O.