Note: Nigeria being a smart nation and watching what has happened to Iraq and other oil and gas producing countries immediately set out to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan in what was later purported to be a huge misunderstanding. #msg-2527152
It looks like Algeria was stolen from the Islamic Salvation Party who won the election, no surprise here, Algeria is a significant oil and gas producer and exporter. Algeria also is a member of OPEC.
It seems the aim of the Salafist Group is not to overthrow the Algerian government but to restore it to its rightful heirs, Islam.
The Salafist Jihad has spilled over into Morocco and now maybe Spain who is suspected of attempting to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and probably others. #msg-2596789 -Am
Northeast Africa: Al-Qaeda's new battleground
23 March 2004
By Ed Blanche
The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), one of the two main Islamic groups still fighting in Algeria, is moving south across the ancient trade routes of the Sahara into Mali, Chad, Niger and Mauritania, spearheading what appears to be a new thrust into Africa by Al-Qaeda.
The Chadian government says that its forces, assisted by a US Navy (USN) PC-3 Orion surveillance aircraft, killed 42 Islamic fighters in a running battle in the Tibesti Highlands near the border with Niger from 8-9 March. This was the first such engagement in the largely Muslim region.
Chad's information minister, Moukhtar Wawa Dahab, said in N'Djamena on 12 March that the fighting erupted when a Chadian patrol on the country's northwestern border stumbled across five trucks packed with GSPC fighters after they had infiltrated from Niger near the remote desert town of Zouar. It was not clear how many militants were involved in the fighting, but they launched rocket-propelled grenades and mortars at the patrol. Dahab said that among those killed were nine Algerians, with the rest from Niger, Mali and Nigeria.
Five prisoners were taken - three from Niger, one from Chad and one Algerian. If these reports are accurate, the composition of the GSPC force indicates that the Algerian organisation, which is known to be linked to Al-Qaeda, has infiltrated the surrounding countries sufficiently to have recruited sizeable numbers of militants and been able to establish a presence in a region that has been untouched by the US war on terrorism.
The presence of Nigerians among the Salafists should ring alarm bells among counter-terrorism agencies. The Muslim-dominated north of Nigeria, Africa's main oil producer, has been wracked by clashes between Muslim militants and Christians for months and the conflict shows every sign of escalating. Hundreds of people have been killed since 2002, 200 of them since February 2004. In the last weeks of 2003, Islamic militants calling themselves the 'Taliban' rose up in the Sahel semi-desert on Nigeria's northeastern border with Niger.
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