Since the beginning of March, French forces have killed more than 40 jihadists in Mali belonging to the affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or its associates.
They have killed at least three important leaders, including the father-in-law of the most wanted of all African jihadists, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, as well as the successor to Mr. Belmokhtar’s mentor, Abu Zeid.
Several top chiefs in a Qaeda spinoff that ruled northern Mali during the 2012 reign of terror also have been captured.
At the same time, jihadists have not pulled off any significant attacks in nearly a year, since twin suicide bombings in Niger last May. Many of their arms caches have been destroyed.
If jihadist groups exist at all, it is as a small band — a few hundred at most — constantly on the run, closely watched by American and French drones, and pushed into the forbidding and lawless deserts of southern Libya, according to Western diplomatic and defense officials in the region.
So the group that terrorized half a country, northern Mali, in the heart of West Africa for much of 2012, taking over its major towns, and threatening other nations in the region, has been reduced to a pale remnant of its former self. It is no longer the pre-eminent threat to the fragile states in West Africa’s Sahel region — the band of desert and semi-desert running just below the Sahara.
“This is a spectacular improvement,” said a senior Western diplomat in the region who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “They have been reduced to some thoroughly inhospitable zones. And they no longer have the means to intervene significantly” — in other words, stage a major attack, the diplomat said. The French military, spread in small bases throughout the region from Chad to Mali, and aided by American technology, has put a serious damper on the terrorist groups.
“The French military apparatus now encompasses all of the Sahel,” Col. Michel Goya, an officer who teaches at the French military academy, said in an email. “We are engaged in a ‘long war’ in the Sahel, in cooperation with the U.S., and constituted by surveillance and strikes.”
For now, the repositioning of French and American forces to counter the jihadist threat appears to be working.
“Their offensive capabilities have been seriously harmed,” said a ranking Western defense official in the Sahel this week who was not authorized to speak on the subject. “Their leaders have been neutralized, their logistics have been damaged. They have much less liberty to move. This is not the AQIM of one year ago,” the official said, using the initials for Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles possessed by the Qaeda affiliate, which officials regarded as a particular threat, have been effectively dealt with, the Western diplomat said.
French officials have expressed irritation with the new government in Mali for not pursuing more vigorously a policy of reconciliation with the perennially discontented ethnic groups of the north — the Tuareg, who allied with the jihadists in 2012 and supplied manpower for the takeover of the region’s principal towns. But as long as the Tuareg show no sign of making common cause again with the Qaeda groups — and that alliance did not turn out well for them — a certain hard-headed realpolitik dictates that their complaints can be safely ignored, or at least neglected.
The same does not apply to the Qaeda affiliates. Their ruthlessness means they must be constantly watched.
“We haven’t eliminated them entirely,” the Western diplomat said. “We are continuing to weaken them. They are under permanent observation.”
Mr. Belmokhtar, the mastermind of the spectacular and deadly attack on the gas plant at In Amenas, in southern Algeria, in January 2013, remains on the run. Yet, “I think it would be difficult for them to do a large-scale terrorist act now,” the diplomat added.
“When you kill 40 of them, after all, you’ve done some damage,” he said. “Their life is pretty difficult right now.”
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