L'Opinion: Salafist and Polisario groups turn desert into international terror base, daily

The Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) and the "Polisario" are part of terrorist organisations belonging to various religious obediences and ethnic origins operating in vast desert areas of the Sahara and the Sahel, said Wednesday the Moroccan "L'Opinion" daily.

Commenting the attack on Saturday against a Mauritanian military unit in Lemghit, some 100 km from the Algerian border, the daily said the aggression "is a new evidence of the installation and development of terrorism in the region."

These groups, including "Polisario" and GSPC elements, the daily said, easily gang together, move and act in these large desert stretches where nomadic and population movements are never monitored and illicit trade, drug and arms trafficking yield important income.

The Algeria-backed "Polisario," which has been claiming the separation of Moroccan Southern provinces, known as the Sahara, retrieved under the Madrid accords in 1975, has been involved in illegal actions, including immigrants smuggling.

The uncontrolled spaces, as those where "Polisario" elements come from, namely the Algerian Tindouf region, were prone to host the groups that are manipulated either by expansionist ideologies and ethnic division or by extremism and religious manipulation, said the daily.

The goal of the groups and those hosting and training them is to destabilise by means of terror the countries of the saharan and sahel region to make of them a base for international terrorism that serves Al Qaida, the daily said.

The attack on the Mauritanian military unit and the way the hostages, taken by the GSPC, were killed brings to mind the suffering the "Polisario" inflicts to the Moroccan prisoners the separatist movement still hold captive in Tindouf camps, the daily said.