AQ works by scaring people, makes them hurt themselves. I think of it as air raids where the greater part of the damage is from anti-air rounds falling down on the city itself.

I don't understand why European governments are so keen to work with MENA police states in the name of fighting terrorism (witness the BAE controversy). Everyone knows they get their intelligence by torturing, which is crap at getting accurate intelligence.

Well, maybe the economic turmoil will give people something real to worry about.

Huff, I've missed this article entirely. Thanks for bringing it up.

On this last - a reference to the murder of French tourists in Mauretania - I have serious doubts this is an organisation at work as such.

You're probably right too, although that could also be a reference to the Tunisian tourists kidnapped. It seems to me as if what ex-GSPC has set up is essentially what al-Qaida had in Afghanistan before 2001, albeit on a much smaller scale and under more difficult conditions ... but still enough to affect the region. Namely, a sort of nexus in which vaguely connected supporters can get basic training and indoctrination, and through which money and recruits can be filtered to/from other places, to some extent. This being in some ways both supported and disrupted by the fact that they have an ongoing Jihad against Bouteflika's government to worry about simultaneously. But to claim that it's a coherent organization all the way from Kabylie to Nouakchott seems absurd, just like it would be absurd to assume actual organizational world leadership on the part of bin Ladin from whatever cave he hides in. Loose connections, cohesion in ideology and identity, and sporadic mutual support, yes, but for the most part self-spawning networks who join only in taking credit -- very sensibly, since that multiplies the media effect.

About police around Algiers, second that. I did an involuntary and highly unpleasant night ride through the mountains around there a while back, after our driver had his own ideas about where to stop and in what order. Roadblocks galore, but a shame about the pretty mountains. Tourism and terrorism unfortunately seems to enjoy the same sort of environments. But my question is why they don't simply hand out uniforms to some 50,000 unemployed thugs and stick them as police INSIDE Algiers? That city can be terribly unpleasant -- less because of terrorist threats than because of glue sniffing, drugged-up, knife wielding war orphans, which doesn't help tourism much either. One thinks that hiring people off the streets should be within their competence now that they've got unlimited cash, even if actual economic development is not. But alas.

through which money and recruits can be filtered to/from other places, to some extent

If there's any money filtering, it certainly isn't making its way to their stomachs. Litterally. I've known first hand security folks who've had some fire exchanges with them or seen some of them dead. Those guys lost teeth from starvation, their stomachs contained essentially some weed and bush leaves, and they were raving even while fighting like they went completely coo-coo as a result of their living conditions.

and they were raving even while fighting like they went completely coo-coo as a result of their living conditions.

Yikes. Well, I suppose they're a bit coo-coo on a full stomach as well, that's why they're up there in the first place. But the GSPC situation is pretty extreme... their hard core has been out in the maquis for like 15 years, stealing chickens and robbing cars to survive for the latter part of that. Yet they still somehow find time to rig car bombs and ambush the army every week; got to give them credit for dedication.

and they were raving even while fighting like they went completely coo-coo as a result of their living conditions.

Yikes. Well, I suppose they're a bit coo-coo on a full stomach as well, that's why they're up there in the first place. But the GSPC situation is pretty extreme... their hard core has been out in the maquis for like 15 years, stealing chickens and robbing cars to survive for the latter part of that. Yet they still somehow find time to rig car bombs and ambush the army every week; got to give them credit for dedication.

and they were raving even while fighting like they went completely coo-coo as a result of their living conditions.

Yikes. Well, I suppose they're a bit coo-coo on a full stomach as well, that's why they're up there in the first place. But the GSPC situation is pretty extreme... their hard core has been out in the maquis for like 15 years, stealing chickens and robbing cars to survive for the latter part of that. Yet they still somehow find time to rig car bombs and ambush the army every week; got to give them credit for dedication.

Well, I suppose they're a bit coo-coo on a full stomach as well, that's why they're up there in the first place.

Yes and no. Without apologism whatsoever for those murderous frankesteins, they were initially forced there in the first place when the army basically gave them the choice between emprisonment/torture/death or the maquis in the days following their electoral victory. I don't know how many in the GSPC or their momentum is still the result of that today, but the initial impulse is definitely the doing of the generals' repressive coup.

(plus you're right about them managing to car-bomb, I didn't mean my comment as an absolute rule.)

I meant that's why they're still up there. Since 2000 they've had every chance in the world to come down if they should want, and there's a standing offer of amnesty since 2005.

Also, I think the really hard hardcore of GSPC is composed of old Afghan Arabs psycopaths more than ex-FIS people, since it came out of the GIA. But for the rebel mainstream, which is now long since demobilized, I definitely agree with you. The FIS didn't stitch together a functioning armed wing until like two years after the coup, so it was clearly not something their leadership had been planning for, and most of their armed supporters probably just ran up the hills fleeing for their lives when the army went door to door. But GIA/GSPC/Qaida, partly a different story.

(Btw, sorry about the crazed overposting.)

No apologies, I would rather whank on about this than goddamned Israeli American ship incidents from 30 fucking years ago.

40 years ago. (Don't skimp on the best arguments for irrelevance.)

Anyway, is there a known demographic or set of demographics, if any, that predominates among GIA and related recruits in Algeria? Class, region, urban v. rural, ethnic, subsect, etc.?

Very good question. I am not sure I know the real answer. I have some thoughts, but in reflecting right now I am not sure where my sense of them is coming. Reputationally I have always understood the Recruits to be largely urban and from the "Hitiste" profile. But this may not be more than an impression.

There are studies of that, I know, since I have at least one lying in a box of books at home. However, me sadly being far away from home, and not having had time to read it yet, I don't know what the conclusions were. From flipping it casually, the only thing I remember was that regional FIS sympathies apparently correlated quite well with MNA sympathies during the Independence War -- MNA was the rival movement of the FLN, crushed by them during the war. That I find interesting, and plausible. I don't know what it says about GIA, in that regard, but I assume that it is different, since GIA spent much of the 90s slitting throats in those same communities.

As for GIA's social composition, they were kicked off by Salafi fanatics largely based around Afghan returnees (like most political freaks, presumably from the lettered classes) who had refused to parttake in the elections, democracy being so very kufr. But after that, during the war, they were known to recruit from the poor, precisely urban hittiste, as L says. They were always strongest in the Algiers suburbs and surroundings, where you'd find the most miserable urbanization washup. FIS (and its armed wing AIS) had a more political profile, with its core being composed of students and people with a background in (wildly divergent) religious politics, and although they were supported by a lot of poor urban people in the elections, the cadre was not lumpenproletariat to the same extent as GIA. There may well be a new break in recruitment profiles with the emergence of GSPC, since it was based around certain leaders and certain regions, and since it has doctrinal differences that may appeal differently, but I don't know.

There's a brief but interesting discussion of Algeria in Jason Burke's great al-Qaida book, and he spends much of the book making this thesis more generally -- that the vulgarization of political Islamism into crude Jihadi-Salafism that eg. the GIA (and later, GSPC) stood for, joined with the trend of recruitment from poorer, less educated and politically/religiously aware classes all around Islamist politics. Sort of like the reduction of Marxism-Leninism, with its quite sophisticated (if ultimately loony) economic-philosophical arguments, into Stalinism as a gung-ho war ideology.