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US ambassador sez GSPC spreading into Mauritania
The United States fears hardline Islamic militants moving around the Sahara desert could try to topple the Algerian and Mauritanian governments, senior diplomatic and military officials said.

The U.S. ambassador to Mali, Vicki Huddleston, said a leader of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), an Algerian group allied to al Qaeda, could be looking to re-arm and link up with other militants in the region.

The leader, Amari Saifi, known as el Para and widely regarded as the GSPC's second-in-command, claimed responsibility for kidnapping 32 European tourists in the Sahara last year.

"There is a worry that he is looking for arms to continue terror action and that he could try to overthrow the government (in Algeria)," Huddleston told Reuters in a telephone interview late on Wednesday.
Except that el Para was supposedly killed in Chad last week, so either he's back from the dead or Huddleston hasn't gotten the memo yet.

Military experts and diplomats in Algeria are concerned the GSPC may carry out more spectacular and desperate attacks now military offensives have sharply reduced rebel forces. But unlike the 1990s, experts do not believe the Algerian state is threatened, largely because of the huge security in place.

Huddleston also said plotters behind an attempted coup in Mauritania last June were believed to be hiding in northern Mali -- a state five times the size of Britain -- and they could link up with the Salafists to threaten the country again.

The United States has taken an increasing interest in the Maghreb and the Sahel regions -- which lie to the north and south of the Sahara respectively -- since the suicide airplane attacks on New York and Washington two and a half years ago.

"Part of this (interest) was September 11 -- the fact that there are vast spaces up in the north of these countries that could be used by terrorists and others who are against the West," Huddleston said.

U.S. Special Forces finished training Malian troops in Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara, on Thursday. U.S. military experts will also go to Niger and Chad to help tighten border security in one of the world's most inhospitable regions.

A Malian army commander in Timbuktu said his troops had chased GSPC units out of the country in January.

Brigadier General Douglas Lute, deputy director at the plans and operation centre of U.S. European Military Command, said the presence of groups like the GSPC had boosted instability in the Sahel but posed no immediate threat to the United States.

"We do not perceive an immediate threat on American interests beyond the threat to Algeria itself, which is an ally in the region," Lute told Reuters.
Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-03-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=28565