Algerian Final Govt Attack:: 32 Terrorists, 23 Hostages Killed

Algerian police officers escorted a freed Norwegian hostage as he left the In Amenas police station on Saturday.

The Algerian army staged a final assault Saturday, in an effort to end an Islamist militant assault at a gas station plant. A provisional death toll issued by the Interior Ministry on Saturday reported 32 militants and 23 captives had been killed in the three-day hostage crisis at a remote gas field. Over the course of the crisis, upwards of 685 Algerian and 107 foreign workers were freed. President Obama issued a statement Saturday saying he still wants a "fuller understanding" of what happened in the strike, but added that "the blame for this tragedy rests with the terrorists who carried it out."

 

Read it at Associated Press

January 19, 2013 7:00 PM

 

What little information trickled out was as harrowing as what had come in the days before, when some hostages who had managed to escape told of workers being forced to wear explosives. They also said there was at least one summary execution and that some had died in the military’s initial rescue attempt. On Saturday, an Algerian official reported that some bodies found by troops who rushed into the industrial complex were charred beyond recognition, making it difficult to distinguish between the captors and the captured. Two were assumed to be workers because they were handcuffed.

 

The Algerian government has been relatively silent since the start of the crisis, releasing few details. It faced withering international criticism for rushing ahead with an assault on the plant even as governments whose citizens were trapped inside pleaded for more time, fearing that the rescue attempts might lead to more workers dying. The Algerians responded by saying they had a better understanding of how to handle militants after fighting Islamist insurgents for years.

 

One of the Algerian officials defended the military assault on Saturday, saying the government feared the militants were about to set off explosions at the In Amenas complex.

The militants had set fire to the plant’s control tower on Friday night, creating an “immense fire,” the official said, only extinguished through an all-night effort by soldiers and workers. They then attempted to blow up a pipeline, he said. Worried officials recalled that there were stocks of gas at the plant.

“The authorities were afraid they were going to blow up the reserves,” said the senior official, who believed the militants had planned all along to destroy the plant. The Algerian state oil company, Sonatrach, said Saturday that the attackers had evidently mined the facility with the intention of blowing it up and that the company was working to disable the mines.

 

Whatever the goal, the message of the ambitious assault on the well-defended gas complex, in a country that has perhaps the world’s toughest record for dealing with terrorists, seemed clear, at least to Algerian officials Saturday: the Islamist ministate in northern Mali, now under assault by French and Malian forces, has given a new boost to transnational terrorism. The brigade of some 32 Islamists that took the plant was multinational, Algerian officials and some escaped hostages said — with only three of their own nation in the group. We have indications that they came from northern Mali, at the origin,” one of the senior officials said. “They want to establish a terrorist state.”

 

 The militants who attacked the plant said it was in retaliation for French troops sweeping into Mali this month to stop an advance of Islamist rebels south toward the capital.

 

The Algerians have made a virtue out of keeping a lid on these militants, pushing them toward Mali in a strategy of modified containment, and ruthlessly stamping them out when they attempt an attack in the interior of the country. So far it has worked, and Algeria’s extensive oil and gas fields, extremely important revenue sources, have been protected.

That relative success had allowed Algeria to take a hands-off approach to the Islamist conquest of northern Mali in recent months, even as Western governments pleaded with it to become more directly involved in confronting the militants, who move across the hazy border between the two countries.

But now, with last week’s attack, Algeria may have to rethink its approach, analysts suggest, and engage in a more frontal strategy against the Islamists.