A Dangerous Combination

Co-authored by John Schindler

Two weeks ago, al Qaeda-linked jihadists attacked the Splendid Hotel in Burkina Faso and murdered 28 people, including an American missionary. It was the work of al Qaeda’s Algerian franchise, one of the world's deadliest jihadist groups, albeit one less known to Westerners. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is led by the one-eyed Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a charismatic terrorist who has evaded death and capture numerous times and in the process transformed AQIM into a major threat across West Africa. It's time we paid more attention to Belmokhtar and his jihadist gang—as well as to the troubled country that produced them.

In sharp contrast to the once-trendy leftist myth of Algeria as a kind of secular Arab socialist paradise, the Algeria of 2016 is a backwards country drowning in stagnation and repression. A large proportion of its young men and women wish to flee to France to secure economic opportunities and escape the secret police.

Economic malaise puts the military regime—which has run the country since the French departed in 1962—at risk. A staggering 60 percent of state revenue comes from the energy sector, and over the course of 2015, collapsing oil prices banged up the economy. Still, the regime has a large cushion that enables it to cope. With a robust $200 billion in foreign reserves, the junta retains the option of pumping money to the populace to reduce social unrest. Put simply, the Saudi remedy of using cash to placate restless masses is available, at least for the near and medium term. The long term is something else.

Ordinary Algerians do not know if their ailing 78-year-old president Abdelaziz Bouteflika is lucid. He communicates via opaque letters, while his public appearances have dwindled. The man who once promised to save the country from the abyss has grown senile and ineffectual. The severely ill Bouteflika has ruled since 1999 (he is the country's longest-serving president) and has been incapacitated since 2013, when he suffered his second stroke. His fourth-term victory in 2014 was widely viewed as the product of a fundamentally corrupt electoral process.

Together with the struggling Algerian economy, the fight to succeed Bouteflika may very well produce a series of increasingly public convulsions within Algeria's formidable security and intelligence establishments, who are the country's real rulers.

Since independence, the shadowy and feared military intelligence service, the Department of Intelligence and Security, or DRS, has been the backbone of the corrupt system—what the Algerians call le pouvoir (the power) that runs the country. But the hold of the DRS may be slipping. In September, the hidden hand of the Algerian state ousted the head of the intelligence service, General Mohamed Mediène, popularly known as Toufik. Mediène had run the DRS since 1990 and was the world's longest serving intelligence boss, but nobody had seen him in public in years, and few pictures of him existed. A widened purge of generals and senior officers largely coincided with Mediène's removal, including the arrest in August of the head of counterterrorism, General Abdelkader Ait-Ouarabi.

Mediène and the regime waged a ruthless war against Islamist militants in the 1990s, a war that cost nearly 200,000 lives, most of them civilians, without solving Algeria's deeply rooted Islamist problem. And this brings us back to Mokhtar Belmokhtar, involved both in Algeria's bloody civil war of the 1990s and its precarious present. The man who lost his left eye while mishandling explosives was so enamored of Osama bin Laden that he named a son after the al Qaeda leader. He allegedly masterminded the 2013 attack on the Tigantourine gas plant in Amenas, eastern Algeria, which resulted in the deaths of 40 oil employees, including three Americans, and became a bona fide star of the global jihad movement. The revolutionary jihadist zeal and discipline that Belmokhtar embodies is a point of attraction for many young and disaffected Algerians.

The religious nationalism of the 1991-2002 Algerian civil war mirrored, in striking ways, the conflict that has left Syria in tatters: Both upheavals were animated by the exercise of democratic tendencies—the ballot in Algeria and, initially, peaceful protests in Syria. Both the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria and Bashar al-Assad's Baath party in Syria insulated themselves from reform. Determined security services showed no hesitation in crushing Islamist movements. In the case of Algeria, during the 1990s, the FLN forced the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) into organizational and political oblivion, and then fought a bloody war against the armed groups that succeeded the FIS. Assad's father, Hafez, just as ruthlessly killed perhaps as many as 40,000 Sunni Islamists in the 1982 Hama massacre. Today, Syria has largely ceased to exist as a cohesive state. Algeria, however, has thus far dodged “Arab Spring” revolts unfolding in its neighborhood. But for how much longer?