Militant group Al Mourabitoun claims Mali hotel assault
Accra: If Islamist militant group Al Mourabitoun is confirmed as responsible for Friday’s killings at a hotel in Mali it will be the latest time it has staged a major attack despite setbacks and the supposed death of its leader.
Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar has been a key figure for years in insurgencies across North Africa and the Saharan border region, but in June authorities in Libya said he had been killed by a US airstrike there.
US military officials said he was targeted, only for al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) to deny four days later that he was dead. In a statement posted on Twitter on June 19, the group said he was “still alive and well and he wanders and roams in the land of Allah, supporting his allies and vexing his enemies”.
His group now claims to have stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako on Friday in a joint operation with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). At least 27 people have been reported killed and gunmen were still holding out against Malian commandos many hours later.
Al Mourabitoun has staged several attacks in Mali and the region, but Belmokhtar has had a troubled relationship with al-Qaeda. His group has not pledged allegiance to Islamic State, as Nigerian militant group Boko Haram did in March.
One security source said the Bamako attack could serve to sway global attention to al-Qaeda from Islamic State, which controls a swathe of Iraq and Syria and launched coordinated assaults a week ago in Paris in which at least 129 people died.
Al Mourabitoun “is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, whose roots go back to the Algerian insurgency of the 1990s ... Their strategy has been to launch these fairly dramatic attacks,” said Gregory Mann, professor of West African history at Columbia University in New York.
The group’s leadership is mostly from Algeria and Mauritania but it has flourished in Mali and drawn militants from other West African countries including Togo, Burkina Faso and Ghana, he said.
Al Mourabitoun launched an assault in August on a hotel in the town of Sevare, 600 km (375 miles) northeast of Bamako, in which 17 people including five workers for the United Nations mission in Mali were killed.
In March, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on a restaurant in Bamako that killed five people, including a French citizen and a Belgian security officer.
Militants linked to Belmokhtar stormed a major gas plant in Algeria’s Sahara desert in January 2013 and killed 40 employees in a four-day siege and have been blamed for several kidnappings of foreigners.
Belmokhtar’s greatest coup came in 2012 when his men and members of al-Qaeda’s north African arm, AQIM, formed a loose alliance that seized northern Mali’s desert regions. He was reported killed in fighting in Mali in 2013.
The militants were scattered by a French offensive in January 2013 but insurgents have continued to carry out sporadic attacks despite the presence of some 3,000 French troops in the region and several thousand UN peacekeepers in Mali.