A Jihadist in the Sand: The Rise of Abdelmalek Droukdel, al-Qaeda’s Amir in Algeria
A Jihadist in the Sand: The Rise of Abdelmalek Droukdel, al-Qaeda’s Amir in Algeria
Abdelmalek Droukdel (a.k.a. Abu Musab al-Wadoud), the current amir of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), should be considered the real power behind the shift in focus of the Algerian jihad. Droukdel was an early volunteer in the struggle launched by the Armed Islamic Group (the GIA) against the Algerian government in 1992. Today, under Droukdel’s leadership, Algeria’s extraordinarily violent Islamists have expanded their goals from attacking the near enemy that is the staunchly secularist, autocratic Algerian regime of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and have adopted a much more far-reaching aim of assimilating into Osama bin Laden’s global jihadist war against the West and Muslim governments that it views as insufficiently Islamist.
Abdelmalek Droukdel (born April 20, 1970) hails from the small village of Zayyan on the outskirts of Meftah, the principal city of a district of the same name in Blida province about 15.5 miles south of Algiers. This blue-eyed young man was the eighth of twelve children in a family of modest means (El-Khabar [Algiers], October 31, 2005). Droukdel was the only member of his family to be radicalized, joining the militant movement early on. The raison d’etre for Droukdel’s personal journey into militancy, along with many young Algerian men of his era, was the cancellation of the January 1992 elections in which the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut -FIS) was poised to win.
His interest in and strict adherence to core Islamic teachings was apparent even at a young age. In his early teens, he became a regular at prayers at the basic mosque in his rather impoverished village. According to one of his neighbors (El-Khabar [Algiers], October 31, 2005), he also began to isolate himself from other young men his age; he must have objected to some of their activities, such as playing instead of praying. After finishing his secondary and high school education (Baccalaureate in the French system), he enrolled in Soumaâ University in the early 1990’s to study chemistry, a skill set that would soon become an asset when he joined the ranks of the Islamists. It did not take Droukdel very long after the cancellation of the elections to realize that he wanted to take up arms and fight for the Islamization of Algerian society.
Although Droukdel failed in his initial year at university, his interest in chemistry never waned. He is reported to have experimented with his newly acquired knowledge when he was on leave from the university to see his family in their small brick, French-style home. However, his activities at Soumaâ University caught the eye of the Department of Intelligence and Security (DRS-Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité). The DRS was embroiled at that time in a vicious war with armed Islamists, particularly the GIA. The GIA was becoming the dominant force in the mountains surrounding Blida, an area that was referred to for years throughout the dirty war of the 1990s as the “triangle of death.”
Droukdel went into hiding in 1992 when he became aware that the police and the security services were searching for him. He evaded capture for several months, hiding in Blida itself (in a dormitory for university students). When his hideout was finally discovered, he fled to the mountains between Blida and Khemis el-Khechna, in the nearby province of Boumerdès. On May 5, 1993, his name was published by the police as a wanted man alongside six other Islamists who were all to die at later stages of the war.
When he joined the guerrillas in the mountains, Droukdel was accompanied by approximately 25 young men who came from his birthplace and the surrounding areas. However, 15 of those 25 are said to have changed their minds, surrendered, and given up arms to benefit from a series of amnesties offered by successive Algerian governments (El-Khabar, October 31, 2005).
Not much is known about the role played by Droukdel in the immediate period after he joined the GIA in 1993, although he is thought to have been engaged in the process of manufacturing explosives with his knowledge of chemistry. According to Hassan Hattab (a.k.a. Abu Musab), the GIA amir of the second region (which included Boumerdès), Droukdel was operating in the mountains as an unremarkable insurgent under Hattab’s command. Hattab said “I knew him since he was an ordinary soldier. I was the amir of the second region and he was a soldier in a workshop for manufacturing weapons and explosives. He is an ordinary person.” [1]
Droukdel stayed loyal to Hattab when the latter refused to pay allegiance to Antar Zouabri (a.k.a. Abu Talha) who succeeded the GIA national amir Djamal Zitouni (a.k.a. Abu Abdelrahman Amin) in the summer of 1996. Hattab split from Zouabri, but continued to operate under the banner of the GIA, until the name of this group became badly tarnished when Zouabri claimed responsibility for a series of massacres, which took the lives of hundreds of civilians in different parts of the country. These massacres were among the reasons which led another armed group, the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS)—the armed wing of the FIS—to announce a truce in September 1997 after a secret deal with the Algerian authorities. That truce in fighting gave Droukdel an opportunity to see his family. Accompanied by other militants, he descended from the mountains towards his home and met with his father, Rabah, and talked about what he planned to do next. The son had already made up his mind—he had no interest in engaging in a peace process with the government and wanted instead to continue the fight. This was the last time he saw his father alive. Rabah passed away several years ago.
In 1999, Droukdel joined Hattab and others within the GIA ranks to splinter off and form a new group calling itself the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat-GSPC). The GSPC was formed in part as an angry reaction to Zouabri’s indiscriminate killings of civilians, and its formation gave Droukdel the opportunity to start his way up towards a leadership role in Algeria’s jihadist maelstrom that had quickly engulfed the country. Hattab appointed him as amir of a company of soldiers, then as amir of the al-Quds (Jerusalem) Battalion. But Hattab was not content with the way he led the men and sacked him. Hattab said, “I brought [Droukdel] to [work for] me when the GSPC was formed, but he had limited capabilities.” [2]
Droukdel may not have forgiven Hattab’s actions, but nevertheless he stayed loyal to the group and became close to one of its rising stars, Nabil Sahraoui (a.k.a. Abu Ibrahim Mustapha). Sahraoui was a leader who took a different view to Hattab’s regarding the future of the struggle against the government. Hattab started secretly in 2001, testing the waters to see whether the GSPC should stop or continue the fight. Hattab stated that he favored an end to the fighting, especially when prominent religious leaders from the Gulf announced that what was going on in Algeria was not a jihad, and when he saw President Abdelaziz Bouteflika offering peace to those who were willing to lay down their arms. [3] Hattab failed in his bid to convince his group to halt their fight when the GSPC’s mufti, Abu Al-Bara’ Ahmed, refused to openly sanction such a policy. Hattab had to resign and Sahraoui took over in 2003. Soon thereafter, Droukdel was appointed by Sahraoui to serve as head of the GSPC’s Majlis al-Aayan (an assembly of leaders who usually meet to appoint the amir and oversee his work).
One of Sahraoui’s first major decisions was to announce his support for Osama bin Laden in the declared fight against the United States, its European allies and what al-Qaeda ideologues term apostate regimes in ruling corrupt Muslim majority states. But Sahraoui’s leadership did not last long. In June 2004, the Algerian army ambushed him in the mountains of Bejaia, approximately 155 miles east of Algiers. He died alongside three other prominent leaders of the GSPC. One of those killed was thought to be Droukdel. Droukdel’s father was brought to a local hospital to identify the body that, to his great relief, was not his son’s.
When the GSPC leadership met to appoint a new amir to succeed Sahraoui, it had very limited options; Sahraoui had already laid out in his will that he desired Droukdel to succeed him, rendering the appointment process a mere formality.
The newly ordained amir did not deviate from his predecessor’s policy in siding with Bin Laden’s cause of global jihad. The American-led invasion of Iraq and that country’s subsequent occupation in 2003 gave him an opportunity to cement this newly-formed relationship with al-Qaeda, especially with its amir in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2004. By September 2006, the GSPC was more or less a wing of al-Qaeda, having established links with its second-in-command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, operating along the Durand Line that theoretically divides Pakistan and Afghanistan. At that time, Droukdel announced his group’s allegiance to al-Qaeda and Bin Laden, and Zawahiri blessed the GSPC’s work on behalf of Bin Laden. The full merger took place in January 2007 and the GSPC subsequently changed its name to al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
Under Droukdel’s leadership, AQIM began a wave of sophisticated suicide attacks, a tactic relatively unheard of during the worst years of fighting of the post-1992 Algerian civil war. In April 2007, Droukdel sent the first wave of suicide bombers in what he termed “martyrdom operations” against government posts in Algiers, including the seat of government. Droukdel personally claimed responsibility for these attacks in a video statement that month. In December 2007, another wave of suicide attacks rattled Algiers, targeting the Constitutional Court and the local UN headquarters. In 2008, more suicide attacks rocked Algeria, but during 2009 and throughout early this year, there has been an obvious shift in focus towards the Sahel region over Algeria itself while Droukdel has remained mysteriously absent from jihadist media, save for a recent, uncorroborated email purportedly sent by him to the Nigerian press in support of Nigerian Muslims in clashes with their Christian counterparts in the central Plateau State (The Punch [Nigeria], February 2, 2010). The email addressing January’s religious-communal strife in Sub-Saharan Africa, if genuine, may signal Droukdel’s desire to expand AQIM’s influence and actions well beyond the scope of coastal North Africa and the Sahel. Whether Abdelmalek Droukdel actually intends to intervene in an already unstable environment like Nigeria remains to be seen.
Notes
1. Author’s interview with Hassan Hattab, Algiers, March 2009.
2. Author’s interview with Hassan Hattab, Algiers, March 2009.
3. Author’s interview with Hassan Hattab, Algiers, March 2009.
