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France declared an Al-Qaeda target: report

Vaiju Naravane

Algerian Salafist terror group GSPC joins Osama's network

Paris: France has been declared a direct target by Al-Qaeda, the daily Le Figaro revealed on Thursday. Terrorism experts and journalists viewing the September 11 video message by the Al-Qaeda number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in its entirety realised there was a direct threat to France.

"Osama bin Laden has told me to announce to Muslims that the GSPC (the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat), has joined Al-Qaeda," Zawahiri said, according to hitherto unaired extracts of the video issued this week to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Formed in 1998, the GSPC is a dreaded and extremely violent splinter group of Algeria's GIA or Armed Islamic Group which conducted a bloody civil war against the Government that claimed 100,000 lives. The GSPC rejects Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's policy of reconciliation and is regarded as the only radical Islamist movement left in the country capable of causing serious trouble.

French commentators said the group's official linking to Al-Qaeda was "extremely worrying news."

Direct threat

France has felt reasonably protected because of its opposition to U.S. President George Bush's Iraq policy and because it has maintained close ties with the Arab world with often difficult relations with Israel.

However, Zawahiri's open and direct threat sent shivers down the back of the French establishment.

"We pray to God that the GSPC will be a thorn in the throats of the American and French crusaders and their allies," Zawahiri said. "This should be a source of chagrin, frustration and sadness for the traitors and apostate sons of France," Zawahiri said of the GSPC's links to Al-Qaeda.

"We pray to God that our brothers from the GSPC succeed in causing harm to the top members of the crusader coalition, and particularly their leader, the vicious America."

Anne Guidecelli, director of the consulting firm Terrorisc who analysed the message said it has been prominently displayed in the GSPC web site all week. The group's contacts with Abu Moussab al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda's head in Iraq, who was recently killed have been closely monitored by French anti-terrorist officials. An internal memo circulated by the Anti-Terrorism Coordination Unit considered the GPSC to be "one of the heaviest threats that weigh on France, which has historically been a privileged target for Algerian terrorists".

Having lost it strength in Algeria itself, because the population fed up with a violent civil war turned its back on terrorism, the GSPC has now joined international jihadi groups and brought together extremists from the Maghreb region, recruiting not only from Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania and Libya but also from Muslim-dominated black African nations such as Nigeria, Mali and Niger.

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