Fragmentation of militant groups has led to situation where smaller cells are competing for attention and funding
Algerian security forces enjoyed a series of small victories last autumn in their 25-year war against Islamic militants. A spate of kidnappings and robberies had alienated the usually truculent communities of the Kabylie mountains in the north-east of the country and led to a flow of intelligence pinpointing the whereabouts of senior figures in the al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) group. Abdel Malek Droukdel, the group's leader, escaped the dragnet but others did not.
Four months later those same security forces have just fought a fierce battle against more militants who have executed the most spectacular attack in the country since the 1994 hijacking of a French aircraft at Algiers airport. Any satisfaction within the Algerian counter-terrorist community at having reduced AQIM to a relatively marginal threat – a considerable accomplishment given the internal problems of their country and the chaos in the neighbourhood – must now have evaporated.
The group responsible for the hijacking almost 19 years ago, the Groupe Islamique Armé, later fragmented. With no public support following years of brutality and crime, and unable to counter ruthless and experienced security forces, it shattered into scores, even hundreds, of cells and networks. Out of these came the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC), another coalition. The GSPC morphed into a new al-Qaida affiliate, AQIM, in late 2006. Its leaders hoped that a more global agenda and credibility, brought by an alliance with Osama bin Laden's organisation, might act as much-needed glue. Yet there was more fragmentation. And it is one of these breakaway bands, under a former AQIM leader, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, which is thought to be responsible for the latest attack. One motive is to show other extremists just particularly those who vetoed Belmokhtar's appointment as chief of AQIM's southern command,who has the capability to launch high-profile attacks.
One problem with seeing men like Belmokhtar simply as fanatical automatons is that the human factor in their calculations is often forgotten. The militants' own writings often focus more on the acts of their fellow extremists than on the west, hypocrite rulers, wayward Muslims and the "Zionist-Crusader alliance".
Militancy is a tough business – with fierce competition for recruits, kudos and donations, as well as feuds and personality clashes. This marked the Palestinian groups of the 1970s and the mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Indeed, that was the primary reason for the foundation of al-Qaida in 1988.
One former Libyan militant active in the 1990s recalls how bin Laden was initially dismissed as a rich kid who had done nothing. Al-Qaida's attack on US embassies in east Africa in 1998 changed that. "That impressed us," he said. It also impressed all those who eventually contributed to the 9/11 attacks.
Algerian authorities have long known this, cynically sowing dissension and distrust among the extremists. In Mali, AQIM and two local militant groups are now working together in a way that seemed unlikely before French ground troops landed.
The conclusions drawn from this are straightforward: the behaviour of the militants is determined by compulsions as varied as those on any actor in the conflict; the fragmentation of a group can often lead to more extreme violence not less; and countering militancy through strategies that play on internal competition can often work better than frontal assaults.