The Rising Power of North Africa’s Jihadists Rattles Algeria

[Time]

One wet, chilly February morning, Ali Zaoui climbed into his car in Algeria's capital, drove 300 miles south into the desert and knocked on the door of a three-bedroom house in the oasis city of Ghardaïa. Zaoui was well known to the occupants. They were the parents of the then most wanted man in North Africa, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed Islamist commander who had masterminded the hostage siege in January at a natural-gas plant in his native Algeria. The attack resulted in the deaths of 38 foreigners, including managers and specialists of Western oil companies. It was Algeria's worst terrorist attack in years, and the worst ever for the global oil industry, anywhere. Zaoui, a veteran antiterrorism fighter for Algeria's security services, had spent years coaxing armed militants to surrender under an amnesty program and had come to know Belmokhtar's parents well over five years of trying to persuade one of Algeria's most fearsome jihadists to surrender. He never had won over Belmokhtar. But Zaoui thought they had an understanding: Don't target Algeria. (PHOTOS: 50 Years of Algerian Independence: Scenes From a 20th Century War) That deal was now dead. Zaoui was fuming. "I told his mother, 'Tell him to give up, or he will die, and we will send you his body,'" he says, sitting in a café in Algiers on his return, slumped by fatigue after his long journey. "He did not respect our truce." Days later, on March 2, Zaoui woke to stunning news: Chad's military leaders were claiming that they had killed Belmokhtar in battle, in the remote Adrar des Ifoghas mountains along Algeria's borderlands with Mali. His warning to Belmokhtar's frantic mother had been correct: her son would not survive the biggest terrorist attack of his career. "There is no need for me to visit them again," he told me by phone from Algiers, after Belmokhtar's death. "It is over." And yet, the country's terrorism threat remains. In spite of the apparent killing of Belmokhtar (his body has still not been found), the rising power

Via: TIME GlobalSpin