Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Al Qaeda in Mauritania
Al-Qaeda has been pouring vast sums into mosques and Islamic schools in Mauritania, hoping to recruit insurgents and send them to the front lines of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, police said Tuesday.
Police commission spokes-man Yahsdhou Ould Amar said in a statement that by tapping into "powerful networks for external development," the Islamist terror network of Osama bin Laden has financed religious teachers and mosques so as to easily spread its message to young people.
Al-Qaeda has also spent an untold sum to "dragoon the women in our country, to pressure them into being veiled at all times in public," Amar said of a practice that was heretofore uncommon in Mauritania despite the widespread observance of Islam among its 2.7 million people.
Mauritania is one of only three Arab countries that recognizes Israel (the other two being Egypt and Jordan). It is located in the western Sahara:
This report is another one of al Qaeda's footprints in the sands of the Sahara. On April 28, Reuters reported that al Qaeda trainees had been arrested slipping back from camps in the Algerian desert:
The government of Mauritania claims to have arrested the leaders of a terrorist cell that the US military has linked to Al Qaeda...
The statement said seven people had been arrested but police sources said 18 suspects had been placed under arrest in two days of raids against alleged Islamists.
According to police, the detentions followed the departure a few weeks ago of 20 Mauritanians sent to train in guerrilla camps in the remote southern Algerian desert.
The western press -- Reuters and Agence France, at least -- have reacted to the reports of the government of Mauritania with some skepticism. The president of the country, Maaouya Ould Taya, is friendly to Israel by the standards of Arab regimes and has been trying to get closer to the United States. He is no democrat, either, so he is susceptible to the suspicion that he is trumping up the presence of al Qaeda in his country to justify strong-arm tactics against domestic opponents and get closer to the United States. The United States, for its part, has been worried about the spread of al Qaeda into the Sahel. The discovery of oil off Mauritania's coast hasn't diminished American interest, either.
However mixed the motives of the storytellers here, it does seem that al Qaeda has been operating in Mauritania at some level.
The most notorious of Mauritania's radical Islamists is a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani (Mahfouz Ould al-Walid). Abu Hafs acts as a spiritual advisor to al-Qaeda, though he has no special following in this regard. He followed Bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan where the U.S. believes he played an important role in planning the East African embassy attacks and 9/11. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has suggested that Abu Hafs was the prime al-Qaeda advocate for cooperation with Saddam Hussein. In the months after 9/11 Abu Hafs acted as an al-Qaeda spokesman, denying responsibility for the attacks. Abu Hafs was mistakenly reported killed by the U.S. in Afghanistan in January 2002. He is now believed to be in Iran, possibly under detention.
Less well known is a relative through marriage, Mohammadou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who acted as liaison between the Hamburg cell and Osama bin Laden in planning the 9/11 attacks. Ould Slahi is reported to have made two trips to Afghanistan for al-Qaeda training. In 1999 Ould Slahi was in Montreal, where he is alleged to have helped Ahmad Ressam with the "Millennium Plot" bombing attempt. Arrested by Mauritanian police in 2001, Ould Slahi is now believed held in a special CIA unit at Guantanamo Bay.
Both the United States and NATO have sent military advisors to Mauritania, the Americans to train the army and NATO to study Mauritania's coastal security.
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