[Los Angeles Times] Bruce Riedel - One of al-Qaeda's top priorities in the last year has been to create a franchise in Algeria to serve as a node for jihad in North Africa and throughout the Maghrebi diaspora in Western Europe. Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, negotiated with the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat for two years on the terms for having the group join the movement. Late last year, Bin Laden ordered that the group be renamed Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and it began conducting attacks in that name soon thereafter, starting with a series of strikes at police stations and Western oil targets. In announcing al-Qaeda's new Maghrebi franchise on Sept. 11, 2006, Zawahiri declared that it would be "a source of chagrin, frustration and sadness for the apostates [of the regime in Algeria], the treacherous sons of France," and he urged the group to become "a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders." French intelligence officials anticipate attacks on French targets in North Africa and probably in France itself. Jihadist websites in Europe have predicted an attack on French interests since Sarkozy's victory. The first-ever plan to fly a hijacked airliner into a target on the ground was a thwarted 1994 plot by Algerian jihadists to crash an Air France jet into the Eiffel Tower. The writer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
2007-06-15 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive