While our troops sit in the middle of a civil war in Iraq, and fore go hunting down Osama Bin Laden and his principal supporters in Pakistan, Al Qaida has re-emerged to launch deadly terrorist attacks in Algeria:
Ten UN staff were among those killed by bomb blasts in the capital of Algeria today.
Two car bombs rammed into the office of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the country’s constitutional court in upmarket areas of Algiers.
Forty-seven people were killed in total, with a further 43 wounded. Security officials have warned the death toll could top 60.
The two car bombs happened just 10 minutes apart.
All phone lines in the capital have been jammed.
The first car bomb was driven into the constitutional court building in the Ben Aknoun district of Algiers, killing at least 30 people. Algeria’s official news agency reported that several victims were students on a school bus.
Ten minutes later, the second car bomb was driven into the UNHCR in the Hydra district, killing at least 15.
I don’t think Bush’s spin that Iraq is the Central Front in the War on Terror is one the terrorists buy into, do you? Apparently this isn’t the first round of attacks in Algeria, either, but it appears to be the first involving targeting the UN agencies based there.
In April, explosions at a police station and the prime minister’s office killed 30 and wounded 100 in what was thought to be the worst violence Algeria had seen since the civil war ended in 2002.
Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the blasts.
Since then, the terror group has also claimed responsibility for attacks in July and two blasts, at a coastguard barracks and among a crowd of people waiting to meet the Algerian leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in September. The September bombs killed more than 50 people and injured more than 150.
Intelligence services are divided about the nature of terrorist activity in the region. One view is that it remains directly linked to the bloody civil war of the 1990s and is carried out for local reasons by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).
However, earlier this year the GSPC pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, renaming itself the al-Qaida Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb.
On September 11 last year, al-Qaida’s No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a videotaped message saying Bin Laden had personally approved the “blessed union”.
Of course, I’m sure President Bush won’t deign to notice how his policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have helped greatly to spread Al Qaida’s message of hate and enhanced its ability to attract new adherents and allies. Far better to rail against Iran and the possibility it may acquire nukes the “knowledge” to make a nuclear weapon, and how if we let them get that “knowledge” that might end civilization as we know it (despite the fact they halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003). God forbid we actually do something to stop the actual terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, and halt the spread of this vile ideology of violence and murder.
Not part of the Bush reality, I guess.
