TIMBUKTU, Mali, 19 March 2004 — The United States fears hard-line Islamist militants moving around the Sahara desert could try to topple the Algerian and Mauritanian governments, senior diplomatic and military officials said.

The US ambassador to Mali, Vicki Huddleston, said a leader of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), an Algerian group allied to Al-Qaeda, could be looking to re-arm and link up with other militants in the region.

The leader, Amari Saifi, known as el Para and widely regarded as the GSPC’s second-in-command, claimed responsibility for kidnapping 32 European tourists in the Sahara last year.

“There is a worry that he is looking for arms to continue terror action and that he could try to overthrow the government (in Algeria),” Huddleston told Reuters in a telephone interview late on Wednesday.

Military experts and diplomats in Algeria are concerned the GSPC may carry out more spectacular and desperate attacks now military offensives have sharply reduced rebel forces. But unlike the 1990s, experts do not believe the Algerian state is threatened, largely because of the huge security in place. Huddleston also said plotters behind an attempted coup in Mauritania last June were believed to be hiding in northern Mali — a state five times the size of Britain — and they could link up with the Salafists to threaten the country again.

The United States has taken an increasing interest in the Maghreb and the Sahel regions — which lie to the north and south of the Sahara respectively — since the suicide airplane attacks on New York and Washington two and a half years ago.

“Part of this (interest) was September 11 — the fact that there are vast spaces up in the north of these countries that could be used by terrorists and others who are against the West,” Huddleston said.

US Special Forces finished training Malian troops in Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara, yesterday. US military experts will also go to Niger and Chad to help tighten border security in one of the world’s most inhospitable regions.

Earlier this month, Chad’s army killed 43 Islamist militants that its government said were GSPC members during two days of heavy fighting. A Malian army commander in Timbuktu said his troops had chased GSPC units out of the country in January.

Washington fears Al-Qaeda cells driven out of Afghanistan and parts of the Middle East could also be seeking new havens in the region, seen as potentially fertile recruiting ground because of weak national governance and lax border policing.

Brig. Gen. Douglas Lute, deputy director at the plans and operation center of US European Military Command, said the presence of groups like the GSPC had boosted instability in the Sahel but posed no immediate threat to the United States.

“We do not perceive an immediate threat on American interests beyond the threat to Algeria itself, which is an ally in the region,” Lute told Reuters.