Did the terrorists who attacked the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali’s capital Bamako on Friday intend to capture an Air France crew and force them into the air to execute an even more spectacular atrocity?
This is the conjecture of David Zounmenou, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria.
The hotel is American-owned. But Zounmenou is convinced the attack by several gunmen who killed at least 27 people, was aimed at France and inspired by the Islamic State attacks on several different venues in Paris 10 days ago which killed 129 civilians.
The jihadist group Al-Mourabitoun, which is based in the Sahara Desert in northern Mali and established by veteran Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, has claimed that it carried out the attack jointly with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
There had been some speculation, however, that the murderous Nigerian-based jihadist group Boko Haram could have been responsible, because some survivors of the attack had reported hearing some of the attackers speaking English. But Zounmenou said those could have come from Libya, for example.
“And Al-Mourabitoun is the only group in West Africa which can project power beyond its own backyard like this,” he said, noting the many attacks the group had carried out across a large geographic terrain.
Belmokhtar, a one-eyed commander who fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, was formerly a senior figure in AQIM. Zounmenou said he fell out with AQIM’s leaders in 2012. The next year he achieved international notoriety by masterminding an attack on the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria in which 40 staff, most of them foreigners, and 29 jihadists died.
If the Radisson Blu attack was a joint operation between Al-Mourabitoun and AQIM, this would indicate there has been a reconciliation between them – which would be a cause for considerable concern for countries across the Sahel region. Zounmenou said Al-Mourabitoun had also conducted a spate of co-ordinated attacks in Niger two years ago, which hit even the capital Niamey.
“Boko Haram claims to be the West African affiliate of Islamic State but its organisation is so weak that it does not have the ability to operate outside the area of north-eastern Nigeria.”
Zounmenou said Belmokhtar is a capable and ambitious terrorist who has the ability to carry out attacks right across the Sahel. He said he had been expecting an attack somewhere in the region after the Paris attacks. Mali was not an entirely coincidental target, as France has been active in the country.
It’s Operation Serval military intervention in northern Mali in 2012 beat back jihadists and Tuareg separatists which had overrun the north of the country and began marching on Bamako.
Zounmenou said the operation had activated jihadists across the Sahel region. While France had claimed victory after Operation Serval, many of the jihadists had retreated to Libya and other places, preparing to strike again. He noted this was the third recent attack in Mali and asked if the security forces had learned any lessons from the attack on a restaurant frequented by foreigners earlier this year.
Zounmenou said, in support of his surmise that the Air France crew might have been the target, that the airline had suspended its flights to Bamako. If he was right, the crew was lucky the attackers apparently did not know where they were and were stopped before they could find them.
Friday’s attack came against a backdrop of faltering efforts to consolidate the gains made by French troops – later supported by an African contingent and then a UN peacekeeping force – by securing a durable peace deal with the northern militias.
In June, Malian President Ibra-him Boubacar Keïta signed an Algerian-brokered peace deal with the northern rebels which provided the best shot at stability in a long while.
The UN has been growing increasingly wary of its Mali mission for some time as it has suffered abnormally high casualties – nearly 40 killed and over 150 wounded. This is largely attributed to the reluctance and incompetence of the Malian army.
According to the journal Africa Confidential, the army has sub-contracted most of the fighting in the north to state-backed militias and French special forces which remain in the country. This is not a recipe for stability.
Zounmenou’s pointed questions about whether Keita’s government has learned any lessons from previous terrorist attacks are also pertinent in the light of growing doubt about the government’s overall competence and integrity. Africa Confidential wrote last month that: “Donors have already expressed concern about the state’s ability properly to manage and use e3.3 billion in aid that was pledged in 2013 in the aftermath of the French-African military intervention.”
It added that the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had begun scrutinising the Mali government’s finances. “The scrutiny does not appear to be deterring influence-peddlers and corrupt officials, especially some close to the president.”
Zounmenou fears that more attacks are inevitable from Al-Mourabitoun.
ANA
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