Terror in the Sahara: the implications of US imperialism for North & West Africa

Jeremy Keenan

Review of African Political Economy, 2004, vol. 31, issue 101, 475-496

Abstract: Whichever way one looks at it, the Sahara has now become an extremely dangerous place. If one believes all that has been said and written on events in the Sahara by US and other (notably Algerian) military intelligence and associated government agencies and the media since early 2003, then the Sahara-Sahel region of Africa has become a front line in the ‘War on Terror’. If that is the case, the inability of the security forces to apprehend the key terrorists, notably the GSPC ( Groupe Salafiste pour la Pre´dication et le Combat ) under the leadership of their supposed emir Abderrezak Lamari (aka Amari Saifi but generally known as El Para after his stint as a parachutist in the Algerian army), would suggest that the current US administration and its military, which now has special forces and ‘contractors’ fanned out across the region and whose intelligence and operational services have the region under more or less total satellite, air and ground surveillance, is remarkably inept -- something which should no longer surprise us in the light of their debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. If, on the other hand, and as now seems increasingly likely, the Sahara has been made the arena of an elaborate intelligence deception, then the danger to the local populations and the security threat presented by the seemingly inevitable ‘blowback’ from this operation to other regions, notably West Africa, North Africa and Europe itself, is probably even greater.

Date: 2004
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DOI: 10.1080/0305624042000295558

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