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A Terror Leader Emerges, Then Vanishes, in the Sahara

Posted By Ruth King on February 11th, 2013

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323511804578296170934762536.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories

By DREW HINSHAW in Timbuktu, Mali, SIOBHAN GORMAN and DEVLIN BARRETT in Washington

Western forces armed with drones, jets, laser-guided bombs and state-of-the-art wiretapping technology are engaged in a cat-and-mouse hunt for fundamentalist insurgents who have disappeared into the Sahara, holed up in ancient desert hide-outs.

The U.S. is working with France to find the fugitives, including Mokhtar Belmokhtar, whose followers commandeered an Algerian gas plant last month in a kidnap plot that left at least 37 people dead—three Americans among them. For the past decade, the 40-year-old insurgent leader has raised tens of millions of dollars from kidnapping and other criminal enterprises to buy weapons and wage a holy war, U.S. officials said.

French warplanes, before reclaiming Timbuktu last month, fired U.S.-made bombs at hide-outs and the command center of the terrorist group, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which for months had occupied the northern half of Mali. When French soldiers arrived in tanks a week later, they found the blitz to finish off the AQIM’s leadership had instead bombed decoy cars and empty buildings, according to French officials.

One drone has emerged as the go-to model for the U.S. Air Force and CIA. How does it work? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has the “Short Answer.” Image: Getty

Among the insurgents who escaped the French onslaught, Western authorities say, none is as elusive as Mr. Belmokhtar, a breakaway AQIM commander, whose brigade is named Those Who Sign With Blood.

The U.S. is employing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Joint Special Operations Command in a manhunt that underscores how quickly Washington is eyeing an expansion of its counterterrorism actions in northwestern Africa following the gas-plant attack. Senior U.S. officials are pressing to add Mr. Belmokhtar to a list of U.S. targets for capture or killing.

Since arriving in the country on Jan. 11, French and African soldiers have liberated much of AQIM’s seized empire, a Texas-size stretch of northern Mali. Mr. Belmokhtar and the others have since gone deep into the Adrar des Ifoghas: a mountainous gash of petrified lava slogs and cave-pocked stone outcrops the size of the U.K. that has sheltered bandits for centuries.

“We know for sure that these terrorists have hidden themselves here,” said French President François Hollande during a visit to Mali last week.

In recent days, France has dispatched attack helicopters and fighter jets on bombing runs, so far without result. The U.S. has sent surveillance planes and is considering a drone base in neighboring Niger.

Even with its 21st-century hardware and intelligence assistance from the U.S., France is finding it must send in troops.

“You can’t see anything from the air,” said a French colonel and spokesman at the French air base in Sevare, Mali. “You’ve got to have troops on the ground, with intelligence.”

In recent weeks, France dispatched an additional 1,500 troops, bringing its combat force to about 4,000.

On Wednesday, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said he hoped to scale back ground forces as early as next month.

But first, troops are headed into Kidal, the tiny trading town that is the staging point for French assaults into the Ifoghas. The hunt for the al Qaeda fugitives includes French special forces, according to France’s Defense Ministry.

Of the Sahara’s warlords, none have been as effective a commander as Mr. Belmokhtar, according to terrorist watchers.

The CIA has been tracking Mr. Belmokhtar since the early 1990s, when he returned from training camps in Afghanistan to fight the Algerian government.

He spent years riding stolen trucks and SUVs over dunes and boulders across the Sahara, kidnapping foreigners for ransom.

The agency found it difficult to keep up with him, as the Algerian nomad moved across the Sahara, from Mauritania to Libya, said Bruce Riedel, a former top counterterrorism official at the CIA who also worked for the White House during President Barack Obama’s first term.

But Algeria managed to push him into Mali in 2003.

As demand for cocaine doubled in Europe, much of it moved through Mali and its neighbors, where Western officials say he extorted smugglers.

The U.S. State Department also estimates he collected ransoms totaling about $50 million from kidnapped Europeans, mostly tourists, aid workers and miners.

In the five months Mr. Belmokhtar’s men held Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler hostage in 2009, “I never had any idea where the hell we were,” he said in an interview.

The men trekked into different countries to call negotiators, careful to swap out satellite phones for prepaid cellphones, and seemed to know the wiretapping capabilities of authorities on their trail.

Even as Mr. Belmokhtar and his men raked in millions of dollars, their desert lives were austere. They dressed in rags, traveled in pickup trucks and stayed far from civilization, Mr. Fowler recalled.

“I saw zero evidence of material lust,” he said. “We slept in the sand, we ate rice or dry pasta. That was it.”

The overthrow of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi reconfigured the region, after looters broke into his weapons depots and sold much of the arsenal.

In 2011, Mr. Belmokhtar told a Mauritania newswire he dipped into his fortune to buy Libyan weapons for AQIM.

By March last year, AQIM-backed militias had chased Mali’s army out of the country’s north, inspiring a coup by frustrated junior officers in the capital.

A week later, Mr. Belmokhtar strode into the desert city of Gao, surrounded by several hundred fighters and dressed in tunics cut at the shins, a style modeled after Mohammed’s 7th-century dress and meant to convey humility.

Mr. Belmokhtar slept for a few nights in an abandoned customs police building, residents said.

In Timbuktu, he met with local elders furious with the fundamentalist laws imposed by the AQIM but said little, witnesses recalled.

“He’s a disciplined leader. He listened to everybody’s point of view,” said city elder Hasseye Djitteye. “But even when he was here, we rarely saw him.”

From April to January, world leaders debated a response to al Qaeda rule in Mali. Algeria, wary of war, attempted negotiations with fundamentalist zealots. The U.S. asked the government to stage elections. France readied a war plan.

On Jan. 10, the French option prevailed after Islamist fighters streamed toward two military bases in Mali’s south.

Within two days, French jets had pummeled the invaders with bombs, and the first ground troops had arrived.

Less than a week later, Mr. Belmokhtar returned to the attention of U.S. officials after the seizure of the Algerian gas plant.

The attack showed Mr. Belmokhtar’s ability to pool his resources—both AQIM fighters and Libyan weapons—said U.S. intelligence officials and terrorism specialists.

The extensive plan was “at least weeks in the making,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Intelligence analysts said the attack also showed how AQIM was extending both its reach and punch.

“Historically what we have seen is that no al Qaeda threat has ever remained local,” said Bruce Hoffman, an al Qaeda specialist and professor at Georgetown University. “It’s always gone regional and has inevitability also turned against the West at some point.”

The capture of Mr. Belmokhtar and other AQIM leaders would be a capstone of France’s military campaign here.

Other leaders being sought include Mr. Belmokhtar’s AQIM rival, Abou Zeid; AQIM’s leader Abdelmalik Droukdel; and Malian warlord Iyad ag Ghaly—a middleman in hostage negotiations who has since become a warlord himself.

Mr. Belmokhtar’s uncle by marriage, Omar Hamaha, commands a smaller AQIM offshoot and is also a fugitive. In a recent interview, Mr. Hamaha said God promised the warlords control of the Sahara, and he expressed delight that French soldiers were coming to the desert after him.

“The French…they are like the fly that lands down onto honey, and its feet then stick to the honey, and no longer can it fly away,” the Mali-born commander yelled during a cellphone interview.

Asked if U.S. assistance to the French cause would put America on the group’s target list, the gunman said: “Exactly.”

For nearly a decade, U.S. defense and state department officials said they had appealed to Algeria to better monitor border roads in the Sahara.

In December, only after Algerian-led negotiations with Mali’s Islamist insurgents stalled, U.S. diplomats said officials of the North African nation erected border checkpoints.

Even though drivers can skirt border checkpoints in the desert, Western diplomats hope those checks will crimp AQIM access to fuel, food and arms, choking off supplies to insurgents hiding in the Adrar des Ifoghas and, eventually, forcing them out.

French forces now regularly circle Mali with two Harfang surveillance drones, said a Timbuktu-based French captain. Those drones are joined by another four Atlantique 2 manned surveillance planes, and four propjets, said the French colonel who is the spokesman.

Almost daily, France’s Defense Ministry has announced airstrikes on terrorist training sites and barracks across hundreds of miles of desert. So far, they appear to have bombed many empty buildings.

Neighbors outside AQIM encampments in Timbuktu and the northern city of Gao said that insurgents left before the French began their airstrikes on the city.

On Jan. 20, a French bomb flattened the villa in Timbuktu where groundskeepers watched Mr. Belmokhtar and other al Qaeda-backed leaders hold regular meetings. By the time of the strike, the men said, the commanders had moved out.

AQIM employed a number of simple tricks while they held this city, exploiting the limited intelligence collected by the French and others on the ground. Insurgents kept off lights while inside buildings and left them blazing when they were gone, according to the groundskeepers.

Islamists have also shot up generators that power cellphone towers across the desert, crippling a primary means for intelligence officials to collect information about their location across the desert.

French planes were trained to look for AQIM’s signature vehicle: Toyota Hilux pickups packed with Libyan antiaircraft guns. But Malian officials believe the rebels now travel by bus. Others smeared wet sand on their vehicles before they left, said residents, a ruse that confused surveillance aircraft and, according to French officials, bought the terrorists extra time to escape.

“We know their roads, the places where they pass,” said a French lieutenant colonel. “There are moments when we have them, moments when we lose them, and when we find them again.”

One challenge of the hunt is distinguishing between militants and nomads in the Sahara, said retired Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton, a drone specialist with experience working with the French military here. “This could take years,” he said.

On a recent Sunday at France’s air base in Timbuktu, three attack helicopters returned at sunset in a swirl of dust.

Nearby, a cook had worked for al Qaeda-allied rebels at a bombed guesthouse. He said the fighters had long planned their escape. “They said there was a base where they would go,” the man said, “where they have every sort of vehicle save an airplane.”

—Adam Entous in Washington contributed to this article.

Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@dowjones.com, Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com and Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared February 11, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Terror Leader Emerges, Then Vanishes, in Sahara.

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