ALGIERS, 9 August 2007 — Algeria’s Army has killed nine militants in the troubled Kabylie region as part of an offensive against Al-Qaeda’s North Africa affiliate, a newspaper reported yesterday. El-Watan daily said the army also found an ammunition cache during the operation, which took place over the past three days in Bouira province, some 110 km east of the capital Algiers.
It said the militants were thought to have belonged to a rebel cell that plotted a suicide truck bombing on a military barracks in the same province last month, which killed eight soldiers. The bombing was claimed by the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb, which said last month it was planning a violent campaign against “infidels” and government forces in the Maghreb region and urged Muslims to stay away from possible targets.
The group, previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), swore allegiance to Al-Qaeda last year. Algerian security forces have stepped up assaults on its hide-outs after the group switched its focus away from hit-and-run attacks on police in the countryside and onto high profile bombings in towns.
Founded in 1998, the GSPC began as an offshoot of another armed group that was waging an armed revolt to establish an Islamic state. The uprising began in 1992 after army-backed authorities, fearing an Iranian-style revolution, scrapped a parliamentary election that an Islamist party was set to win. Up to 200,000 people were killed in the ensuing bloodshed. The violence has subsided in recent years but some killing continues, mainly in Kabylie and nearby areas.
Meanwhile, the European Commission yesterday announced a 10 million euro ($13.75 million) humanitarian aid package for the Saharan refugees living in camps in western Algeria. The funds, channeled through the EU executive’s humanitarian aid department ECHO, “will help to meet the refugees’ basic needs for food aid, health care, clean water and proper sanitation as well as providing tents and basic household items,” the commission said in a statement in Brussels.
Since Morocco annexed Western Sahara in 1975, when around 300,000 Moroccans settled there during the “Green March,” hundreds of thousands of Saharawis have been forced to live in harsh desert refugee camps at Tindouf, across the border in southwest Algeria.
Despite repeated UN-backed attempts since then to organize a referendum on self-determination for the Western Sahara territory the Saharawi refugees have remained in the camps.
