Last edited Sat Jan 19, 2013, 12:48 AM - Edit history (1)
The media is not powerful enough to be inventing facts on the ground. There are three main fighting groups, two are native Arab/Toureg nationalist forces (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa and Ansar ad-Din, whose commander has been a part of the Toureg resistance struggle for over 20 years).
The third force was formerly based in Algeria. In the 1990s, the Algerian military cancelled elections that a centrist Islamic party was going to dominate; the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA in French) was formed to fight the military dictatorship and their French backers, with a splinter group known as the Salafist Group for Preaching & Combat that took the primary role in the fight after 1999. That party was in conflict with al-Qai'dah for years, but finally made peace with them and rebranded themselves as al-Qai'dah in the Islamic Maghreb (which means "West", Mashriq--Palestine/Syria/Iraq/etc--being "East"
. The 'franchise' name alone seems to the contribution from the 'home office', which is long passed its period of being a central headquarters for their world revolution. The decentralized status of the present organizations seems to be more of a threat now than it was before, for there is no central leadership to decapitate that would affect the groups as a whole.
There is not much of a connection between these parties and the organization led by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, presumably still based in Pakistan. The organization fanned out across the Sahara and Sahel (Niger River basin) over the last few years and has grown very strong on its own, as witnessed by the quick success of the Malian Islamic Coalition (as they call themselves) in rolling over the military junta first, and French invasion forces presently. They have a bit of backing from some Saudi businessmen, but Qatar is opposed to them and supports the NATO invasion (Qatar might as well be made a satellite office of the NATO aggressive alliance now). Contary to unnecessarily optimistic assumption by unqualified professional analysts (same people who crowed about "slam dunks", deadly weather balloons, babies in incubators, and the like), many businessmen and workers in the region (from Mauretania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and the entire Niger River valley in West Africa) support the efforts of the fighters of various organizations against their very corrupt governments, most of which are wholly beholden to NATO powers and are barely above being military dictatorships that siphon money from the people and build themselves palaces.
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