Terror groups unite and rebuild to kill

In the dark world of Islamist terrorism, there is rarely any shortage of people seeking to claim credit for carrying out some appalling atrocity.

So far, two Islamist groups have sought to associate themselves with the two attacks last week in Paris in which 17 people lost their lives.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the jihadist group formed from al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi branches and based in the lawless mountain region of Yemen , has issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

American counter-terrorism officials say they have information suggesting that Chérif Kouachi, the younger of the two brothers who carried out the magazine murders, travelled to Yemen back in 2011, where he received training and a $20000 grant to organise the attacks.

Meanwhile, Islamic State (IS) militants based in Syria and Iraq have indicated that they were behind the attack on the kosher hypermarket in Paris which was carried out almost simultaneously by Amedy Coulibaly.

This may well be the case for, while the Kouachi brothers told onlookers they were AQAP members, Coulibaby announced that his affiliation lay with IS.

The narrow distinction between which groups carried out which attacks may not be of much concern to those struggling to come to terms with the worst French terrorist attack for 50 years.

Yet the fact that two groups, AQAP and IS, supposedly sworn enemies, are now boasting about a combined involvement does illustrate the increasing complexity of Islamist terror networks, and the deepening challenges intelligence and security services face in trying to disrupt them.

Until last week, most counter-terrorism experts were under the impression that the threat posed by the Yemeni-based militants was in decline, particularly after a US drone strike in 2011 killed Anwar al-Awlaki, AQAP’s charismatic, American-educated propagandist. The group’s demise was said to have been further hastened by the emergence of IS, which, after its rapid advance through northern Syria and Iraq, replaced al-Qaeda as the world’s most feared terror organisation.

AQAP’s eclipse, moreover, seemed to be confirmed by the deep rift which emerged with IS over its brutal treatment of Muslims in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the elderly Egyptian cleric who took over from Osama bin Laden at the head of the original al-Qaeda franchise, publicly denounced IS’ barbarous tactics last year, only for his remonstrations to be treated with disdain by the new boys on the Islamist block.

But, as the Paris attacks graphically demonstrate, while AQAP may have faded from public view, it has lost none of its ability to carry out extreme acts of violence. In recent months the organisation attempting to smuggle sophisticated explosive devices within printer ink cartridges has benefited from the arrival of scores of al-Qaeda fighters fleeing the assault on their traditional hideouts by the Afghan and Pakistani military.

Sheikh Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi, a former bin Laden protege who appears in the video claiming responsibility for the Paris attacks, is believed to be only one of several prominent al-Qaeda figures who have relocated to Yemen, where the impotence of the government, weakened by decades of bitter civil war, means the terrorists can operate with relative impunity.

Indeed, the ability of terror cells to regroup and rebuild in different locations is a particularly worrying feature of the mounting threat they pose.

There is nothing al-Qaeda and its affiliates like more than to move into the ungoverned territory created by failed states.

Apart from Yemen, Islamist militants have also established themselves in Libya: the overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011 has left large tracts of north Africa without any prospect of effective government.

The same applies in neighbouring Mali and the rest of the Maghreb region, where the growing number of militants has been most useful for Boko Haram, which is currently waging a campaign of terror in northern Nigeria.

But if Islamist groups are proving adept at creating independent fiefdoms in failed or failing states, last week’s attacks worryingly show that rival Islamist factions, for all their apparent ideological differences, are perfectly willing to working together when it is in their interests to do so.

The Paris shootings may not have succeeded in healing the rift between the remnants of al-Qaeda’s leadership in Yemen and its new IS rival in Syria and Iraq. But the fact that both groups are prepared to boast of their involvement suggests there is little to choose between them in terms of their determination to cause mass casualties.

The lesson from Paris must be that in order to prevent further attacks everything must be done to prevent state failure and ensure failed states no longer provide safe havens for Islamist fanatics. — The Daily Telegraph