Bush Helps Al Qaeda Spread In Africa

by Steve

The folks in Northern Africa can send their thank you cards to George W. Bush for allowing Al Qaeda a new training ground in Iraq from which to send fresh recruits back to their countries.

Al-Qaeda has rapidly extended its influence across North Africa by aiding and organizing local groups that are demonstrating a renewed ability to launch terrorist attacks in the region, such as the triple suicide bombings that killed 33 people here last month, according to counterterrorism officials and analysts.

The bombers who struck the Government Palace and a police station in Algiers, the capital, are believed to have been local residents. But Algerian authorities are examining evidence that the bombers were siphoned from recruiting pipelines that have sent hundreds of North African fighters to Iraq and perhaps were trained by veterans of the Iraqi insurgency, U.S. and European intelligence officials said.

Thanks George W. Bush.

Hamida Ayachi, editor of the Algiers-based daily Djazair News, said organizational links between insurgents in Iraq and armed groups in North Africa have strengthened noticeably in the past year.

"Iraq became a big laboratory to train kamikazes and warriors," Ayachi, the author of a forthcoming book on extremist networks, said in an interview in Algiers. "They are trying to take young people from here to Iraq for training so they can use them later in North Africa.

George W. Bush: Al Qaeda enabler.

The April 11 attacks were carried out by the group al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a local affiliate of Osama bin Laden's global network. Maghreb is an Arabic word for the region of North Africa stretching from Mauritania to Libya.

For most of its decade-long existence, the group had been an independent movement dedicated to overthrowing the Algerian government, with little interest in external affairs.

That began to change in 2003, however, as the Algerians saw potential benefits from an association with al-Qaeda and its declared holy war in Iraq.

Something that wouldn't have happened without George W. Bush's help.

Such alliances have become increasingly common among radical Islamic groups. Since the invasion of Iraq, local networks with "al-Qaeda" appended to their names have surfaced in at least 12 countries.

And none of this would have happened if George W. Bush hadn’t toppled Saddam Hussein. Ask yourself how different this situation would be if Bush had finished the job in Afghanistan first, instead of letting the Taliban rebound and improve. How different would this situation be if Bush hadn’t let Bin Laden escape at Tora Bora or Zarqawi escape several times? How different would things be if Bush had focused on containing Hussein while stomping out Al Qaeda cells throughout the region? How different would things be if Bush had simply listened to the warnings from his intelligence community about the aftermath in Iraq after we “liberated” them?