On 16 January, the Tiguentourine gas plant in the Algerian Sahara was attacked by terrorists. By the end of the siege, five days later, 29 of the 32 attackers and at least 37 of the plant’s foreign workers had been killed. Several Western governments referred to this as an Al Qaeda operation that marked a new phase in the global ‘war on terror’. Apocalyptic pronouncements about the Islamist threat in the region have been commonplace and the attack on the gas plant has been used to justify Western support for the French military intervention in Mali. British prime minister David Cameron even talked about the situation in the Maghreb providing a ‘generational’ and ‘existential’ threat to his country.
In fact, as more evidence comes to light, far from being an example of a strategic attack by a highly organized North African branch of Al Qaeda, the Tiguentourine gas plant incident looks like another case of collusion between Algeria’s secret police, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS) and local terrorists – of the kind detailed in the December issue of New Internationalist. Such collusion between Algeria’s DRS and various ‘terrorists’ has been common in North Africa. This time, however, whatever was being planned appears to have gone drastically wrong, ending in a bloodbath.
