Al Qaeda’s Widening North African Jihad Confounds Foes

Inquiries into the bloody assault on an Algerian gas plant are uncovering increasing evidence of contacts between the assailants and the jihadis involved in killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya nearly a year ago.

The extent of the contacts between the militants is still unclear and nobody is sure there was a direct link between the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the carnage at In Amenas, where 39 foreign hostages were killed in January.

But the findings, according to three sources with separate knowledge of U.S. investigations, shed some light on the connections between Al Qaeda affiliates stretching ever further across North and West Africa.

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At the same time, AQIM is building links with groups such as the Ansar al-Sharia Tunisia, which seeks to expand its followers through Salafist missionary work or “dawa” rather than violent jihad.

“My own take is that there is a great deal of overlap between these groups,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an expert on al Qaeda.

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