Just as many of the weapons so generously given by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the Afghan Mujahideen ultimately fell into the hands of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and were used by them to spread death and destruction in the civilised world, the weapons from Libya—some accumulated by Qaddafi’s Army and others given to his opponents by the intelligence agencies of the US and other NATO countries— are now finding their way into the hands of the new post-Libya crop of jihadists in Northern Mali, Niger, Algeria and Mauritania.
The West under the leadership of the US meddled in Afghanistan in the 1980s in the name of containing communism and preventing its spread in the Islamic world. The result: over two decades of international jihadi terrorism from which the world has not yet fully recovered despite successes in eliminating Osama bin Laden and other important leaders of Al Qaeda. The Afghan and Pakistani Talibans, and the plethora of jihadi organisations of Pakistan, with the Lashkar-e-Toiba in the forefront, are yet to be brought under control due to the complicity of the Pakistani State with them.
Now, new waves of anger, radicalisation and chaos caused by the Western meddling in Iraq, Libya and Syria in the name of promoting democracy are not only threatening to give a new lease of life to the remnants of Al Qaeda of the Afghan vintage, but are also creating a new crop of jihadists determined to keep the blood flowing in the name of Islam till an Islamic Caliphate ruled according to the Sharia comes into being in Northern and Western Africa.
The brutal elimination by the US-led forces with the complicity of Iran of Saddam Hussein, who strongly countered the activities of Al Qaeda, facilitated the ingress of Al Qaeda into Iraq, where it has been spreading death and destruction. Similarly, the equally brutal elimination of Qaddafi, who strongly countered Al Qaeda in North Africa and the Saharan region, has led to the rise of Neo Al Qaeda in Northern Mali.
The process of destabilisation in Northern Mali has got aggravated following the May 26 decision of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), an organisation of secular Tuareg tribes, to merge with the Ansar Dine and declare the formation of a separate state in northern Mali to be called the Islamic Republic of Azawad.
After the signing of the accord on May 26, "Colonel" Bouna Ag Attayoub, an MNLA commander in Timbuktu, told the BBC that "the Islamic Republic of Azawad is now an independent sovereign state." The Ansar Dine did not in the past support the creation of an independent State in Northern Mali, which is the goal of the MNLA. It wanted to establish an Islamic State in the whole of Mali. Now, to strengthen its position, it seems to have tactically decided to support the MNLA’s demand for the secession of Northern Mali. It remains to be seen how far the hitherto secular MNLA and the increasingly Wahabi Ansar Dine will remain united.
Both the organisations draw their followers from the Tuaregs, who are a nomadic tribe found in the Sahara Desert, in Niger, Mali, Algeria and Libya. The Qaddafi regime allegedly supported for many years the secular elements in the tribe and armed them to counter the pro-Al Qaeda elements in the tribe. His regime supported a movement for an independent Tuareg state consisting of the Tuareg-inhabited areas of Niger and Northern Mali. His overthrow and brutal murder by the pro-Western armed mercenaries have weakened the secular elements in the tribe and strengthened the hands of the Wahabi elements.
Many Tuaregs, who were fighting in Libya either with Qaddafi’s Army or with the anti-Qaddafi mercenary forces trained and armed by the Western intelligence agencies, returned to Mali in March with the weapons acquired by them in Libya. Since then, Mali, which had a tradition of democratic rule, has been going through increasing instability following a short-lived military coup in March, which overthrew the elected government of President Amadou Toumani Touré .A month later, Dioncounda Traoré, 70, the leader of the country’s National Assembly, was sworn in as interim President. He has not been able to impose his authority
In a statement disseminated from Mauritania on July 7, Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) warned against anyone in Mali collaborating with a foreign military force that might intervene in north Mali. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a leader of AQIM, warned that no one should be tempted to “profit from the situation” in north Mali “by collaborating with the foreign forces who are eyeing the region.”
The previous day, another jihadist group calling itself the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), threatened countries who joined a military intervention force.