Only noticed now, two years old, but makes more sense now with Mali and Niger in play.
Jeremy Keenan explains how a Saharan front in the ‘global war on terror' was fabricated.
Jeremy Keenan
AlJazeera, 29 Aug 2010
In November 2009, Richard Barrett of the UN's al-Qaeda-Taliban monitoring team said that while attacks by al-Qaeda and its operatives were decreasing in many parts of the world, the situation was worsening in North Africa. He was referring specifically to the Sahel region of southern Algeria, Niger, Mali and Mauritania.
While the UN statement fits the catastrophic image being portrayed of the Sahara-Sahel region by the US, European and other Western interests, the truth is not only very different, but even more serious in that both the launch of the Saharan-Sahelian front in the ‘global war on terror' (GWOT) and the subsequent establishment of al-Qaeda in the region have been fabricated.
These two deceptions have one key feature in common, namely that they were both implemented by Algeria's secret military intelligence service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), with the knowledge and complicity of the US.
I will explain each in turn.
Militarising Africa
A Saharan front in the GWOT was planned by the US and Algeria in 2002 and launched in early 2003.
The pivotal incident that justified the launch of the new front was the abduction in February-March 2003 of 32 tourists in the Algerian Sahara, ostensibly by Islamic extremists of Algeria's Groupe Salafiste pour le Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) under the leadership of Amari Saifi (aka El Para). However, it transpired that El Para was an agent of Algeria's DRS and his false flag operation had been undertaken with the complicity of the US department of defence.
