Not again, please

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Aug 21st 2008 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

Islamists linked to al-Qaeda may be reviving their campaign in the Maghreb


“THIS looks like Iraq, not Algeria,” declared a distraught witness to the carnage of a bombing that killed 43 police recruits in a town to the east of Algeria’s capital, Algiers, on August 19th. His words were apt. There has been a dramatic rise in attacks by Islamist extremists in the country during the past fortnight, with at least 79 people killed in various incidents across eastern Algeria, most of them in a spate of suicide bombings similar to those that have ravaged Iraq. The targets have been similar too, including police stations, a coast-guard outpost, and a bus transporting Algerian workers for a big Canadian company.

The attacks appear to be the work of Algeria’s main remaining Islamist guerrilla group, which in 2006, after contacts with al-Qaeda’s mother organisation, renamed itself al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Earlier this month it issued a chilling warning to Algeria’s pro-Western rulers: “We tell the sons of France, the slaves of America and their masters, too, that our finger is on the trigger, and the convoys of martyrs are longing to rampage your bastions in defence of our Islamic nation.”

Algeria is no stranger to violence. The civil war that erupted in 1990 and raged for a decade left as many as 200,000 dead. Exhaustion, ruthless policing and the offer of an amnesty calmed the strife. But it began to mount again last year, in a sign that the al-Qaeda brand name, along with the government’s slowness to use its windfall of oil revenue to tackle chronic problems such as the legions of resentful young people without jobs, was winning recruits.

Though estimates of AQIM’s manpower are in the low hundreds, compared to the tens of thousands of rebels at the height of Algeria’s troubles, they seem well-trained, well-financed, highly motivated and mobile. Most of the recent violence has been in the long-troubled mountain areas east of Algiers, but the group and its affiliates have struck as far afield as neighbouring Tunisia and Mauritania, as well as the heart of the capital, where last December they blew up the UN’s main office and a court building.