Suicide bomber kills 43 in Algeria
Suicide blast against police recruits in the Algerian town of Issera, close to Boumerdès, kills 43, or something like that. May be the bloodiest single attack since the massacres in the 1990s, although competition is stiff from the GSPC/al-Qaida blasts in December 2007. Not much more to say except this will keep happening for quite some time more -- hopefully, rarely -- and Algeria is going to have to normalize its political climate best it can under these circumstances.
AFP: 43 killed in attack on Algerian police school.
BBC: Bombing kills dozens in Algeria.
Reuters: Algerian Islamist calls on rebels to lay down arms. (Short: Hattab encore.)
APS: Le gouvernement condamne vigoureusement l'attentat des Issers (Boumerdès)
The Canadian Press: A look at the increasingly deadly insurgent attacks in Algeria.
Also see the post over at Poly-Ticks, which discusses the same Jamestown analysis of the state of al-Qaida in the Maghreb, as I brought up here.
7 comments:
Given the news of today and yesterday, the discussion as to whether the government is making any progress on AQ seems more relevant than ever. I think it will be pretty hard to convince the public that militants are just trying to "loosen the net closing around them", as the interior minister suggested today. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like the "government" has "no control" or is "unwilling to take control" over the "situation".
I'd say the government, with or without quotation marks, has some control. It can't be toppled and it can easily prevent armed groups from overrunning cities, but it also can't defend itself (or anyone else) against bombs, sniping, hit-and-run attacks, and so on.
I don't think it says anything much about the physical situation of the GSPC/AQIM, but it does say something about their mental state. Attacking queing police recruits -- less important in the Kufr repression machinery than traffic cops -- shows they not only are no longer interested in popular opinion, they don't even fundamentally understand it anymore. This is a cult, not a guerrilla.
Alle, "Attacking queing police recruits -- less important in the Kufr repression machinery than traffic cops..." is putting a value a bit too fast I think. The attack came from a group actively recruiting young men themselves, so an attack on enemy recruits is like drawing a line for the youth: you're with us or against us. I think they think attacking recruits has a high propaganda value.
An attack on a traffic cop can easily be considered to be cowardly for he is not in a repressive but in a social mode.
Yeah, I think they think so too, but that's because they're screwed up. Any Algerian except the most hardcore Salafi-Islamist loon will realize that these kids were not queing up to repress Muslims, but because they were desperate to get a job and feed their families. To blow them up and then label them "unbelievers" who will go to Hell is not just bad strategy, it's bad PR -- especially in a country where armed Islamism has already fouled up once and managed to alienate the previously supportive part of the population by being too extremist (the GIA).
Alle, these guys are screwed up for sure. But I don't think they are in the PR bussiness. They are at war and that's where their logic comes from. They do sustain their war for some time now and since keeping it up makes sense to them, whatever sense it might be, attacking recruits is probably a part of their strategy. Recruits in Irak have been targeted as well. I think this is some sort of guerrilla-warefare but not for the hearts and minds of the people. Looks more like some kind of maffia-war to me. The bussiness of fear and anger.
I think both of your observations taken together present a good picture of what is happening. On the one hand, the overarching goal of AQitIM's tactics is destabilizing/weakening/disrupting the government. On the other, the group behaves "cult"ishly as it pursues this far-fetched notion that the Algerian regime can be replaced via these tactics. They've certainly painted themselves into a corner: they can't just give up, but they have no political/popular legitimacy either.
The connections with *the* (much ballyhooed and boogyman-ed) Al Qaeda more and more seem to be logistical: all of these groups act as nodes along a chain in a loose coalition of smugglers and weapons runners. There may be a similarly Salafi-Islamist undertone, but the goals of the former GSPC are *very* Algerian-specific in nature.
I don't know if there are 10 or 10,000 fighters in Algeria. All I know is that theirs is one of many possible responses to the government's arrangement with its people. Resolve this disconnect, and there will be little market for this kind of stuff in the future.
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