A Ragtag Insurgency Gains a Qaeda Lifeline

This article is by Souad Mekhennet, Michael Moss, Eric Schmitt, Elaine Sciolino and Margot Williams.

NACIRIA, Algeria — Hiding in the caves and woodlands surrounding this hill-country town, Algerian insurgents were all but washed up a few years ago.

Their nationalist battle against the Algerian military was faltering. “We didn’t have enough weapons,” recalled a former militant lieutenant, Mourad Khettab, 34. “The people didn’t want to join. And money, we didn’t have enough money.”

Then the leader of the group, a university mathematics graduate named Abdelmalek Droukdal, sent a secret message to Iraq in the fall of 2004. The recipient was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the two men on opposite ends of the Arab world engaged in what one firsthand observer describes as a corporate merger.

Today, as Islamist violence wanes in some parts of the world, the Algerian militants — renamed Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — have grown into one of the most potent Osama bin Laden affiliates, reinvigorated with fresh recruits and a zeal for Western targets.

Their gunfights with Algerian forces have evolved into suicide truck bombings of iconic sites like the United Nations offices in Algiers. They have kidnapped and killed European tourists as their reach expands throughout northern Africa.

Last month, they capped a string of attacks with an operation that evoked the horrors of Iraq: a pair of bombs outside a train station east of Algiers, the second one timed to hit emergency responders. A French engineer and his driver were killed by the first bomb; the second one failed to explode.

The transformation of the group from a nationalist insurgency to a force in the global jihad is a page out of Mr. bin Laden’s playbook: expanding his reach by bringing local militants under the Qaeda brand. The Algerian group offers Al Qaeda hundreds of experienced fighters and a potential connection to militants living in Europe. Over the past 20 months, suspects of North African origin have been arrested in Spain, France, Switzerland and Italy, although their connection to the Algerians is not always clear...............