Al-Qaida and the US Agree on Mauritania

Al-Qaida and the United States are not usually on the same side of an issue. One exception though: Mauritania. After the bloodless military coup of Aug. 6 in this North African country, both al-Qaida and the U.S. were quick to denounce very vocally the new regime.

While it is true that this coup puts a stop to the recent democratization process, it would have been wise for the West to read between the lines and assess that one of the major reasons for this event was to stop the Islamists.

Mauritania has a history of coups: The country has had 31 coup attempts since 1978; some were successful. Sheikh Sidi Ould Abdallahi, the president that was unseated, was the first democratically elected leader of Mauritania in 2007. He was a civilian and a democrat but had been contested within his own majority and the country had witnessed a major political crisis in the three months preceding the coup.

Abdallahi made mistakes that made him unpopular with the population and the very powerful military. He opened up the prisons, freeing at the same time dangerous Islamists. According to a Mauritanian intellectual: "This was a mistake because, in a country with an oriental mentality where the despotic [need] remains very strong, this democratic concession was seen as a sign of weakness." Thus the Islamists have been all the more active for the past two years. Furthermore, the president made several gestures to please the Islamists, such as re-establishing the Muslim week-end (Friday and Saturday), building a mosque in the presidential palace, allowing the creation of an Islamist political party that legitimized Islamists.

But what was not tolerated by many people is the wave of terrorism that Mauritania experienced. Indeed, in a span of one month between December 2007 and January 2008, the Paris-Dakar race had to be canceled because of credible terror threats in Mauritania and three serious terrorist attacks that took place.

Among a large portion of the population, these terror attacks represented a tipping point. Mauritanians blamed the president for not having a strong grip on the Islamists, as his predecessors did. In fact, after the attacks the president seemed hesitant to take the appropriate measures to forcefully tackle the terrorist issue. And contestation of his power started to grow stronger, especially among the military that called for a tougher stance on terrorists.

Mauritanians have a long tradition of tolerance -- it is one of only three Arab countries hosting an Israeli embassy. Ahmed Ould Daddah, a leader of the opposition and nephew of the first president of independent Mauritania, said: "Mauritanians are very humiliated. For us, a foreigner is sacred. Never were any Frenchmen so coldly murdered. This is a new phenomenon, a very serious one."

The security situation also went from bad to worse, and it was not a major surprise that the military decided to seize power to reverse this trend.

Al-Qaida right away knew that this change of regime was going to be a setback for them. So, AQIM issued a communiqué on the web calling for all the forces in the Maghreb to converge to Mauritania to kick out the new regime and install an Islamic state. Also interestingly, AQIM accused the United States and France of being the instigators of the coup. Weirdly enough, at about the same time, the U.S. and France both forcefully condemned the coup calling the new regime illegitimate and suspended their non-humanitarian help, which actually included financial support to fight the war against radical Islam.

The fact that al-Qaida and some Western nations agree over the new Mauritanian regime should make the U.S. and French diplomacy review their troubling assessment of the situation. This all the more so that North Africa has become a very important battlefield for al-Qaida and that Mauritania, a vast and sparsely populated (three million), has always been the soft underbelly of the region.