MAURITANIA

Battling Islamic extremism

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Straddling Arab and black Africa, Mauritania's security is being threatened by an Islamist upsurge that has plagued neighbouring Algeria and Morocco, as the recent killing of French tourists by suspected Islamists has shown. (Report:B.Harris)

Dec. 26, 2007 – Mauritanian authorities have launched a massive manhunt for three men suspected of killing a French family on vacation on Monday outside Aleg, southeast of the capital of Nouakchott.

“Checkpoints and roadblocks have been set up along the Mauritanian and Senegalese border,” said Tidiane Sy, an independent journalist in Dakar, Senegal. “Most of the countries in the region, including Mali and Senegal, are trying to help Mauritania track down the killers.”

Robbery was initially cited as the motive, but Mauritanian prosecutors believe two of the three turbaned men who gunned down the four tourists and wounded a fifth are Islamist extremists allied to Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), an Algerian-based militant Islamic group that has changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb after officially allying itself to al Qaeda last year.

Five people have been arrested so far in the investigation, including one man who had previously been convicted and served a jail sentence in Mauritania for belonging to a "terrorist group". He was suspected of having organised the cars used by the killers to carry out Monday's attack and to flee the scene.

“Islamists – a threat to Mauritania”

“Islamist extremism is a big threat to Mauritania,” said FRANCE 24 news editor-in-chief and Mauritania specialist, Moktar Gaouad.

The threat persists despite the country’s efforts to curb al Qaeda-linked terrorist attacks, which have struck neighbouring Morocco and Algeria in recent years.

“There is immense US pressure on the Mauritanian government to arrest and capture Islamists,” said Gaouad. “The previous government carried out raids every year and rounded up many Islamists across the country."

But analysts believe the threat of terrorism has increased due to a change in government polices after the new government came to power in March 2007.

“The current government led by President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi has allowed Islamists to create a political party, unlike the previous government,” said Gaouad. “The Mauritanian Islamist party is against terror, but outside this legal framework we find Islamist extremists with strong links to Algerian Islamists.”

The GSPC, which changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb last year, first hit Mauritania in June 2005 in a massive attack on a military post.

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