France turns page on ISIS in African Sahel by killing Sahrawi

Mustafa Kamel

France has turned a new page from the black book of ISIS by killing its leader in the Greater Sahara, Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, who was responsible for most of the attacks in the border triangle between Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, on the night of Wednesday, September 15. French President Emmanuel Macron considered the killing of Sahrawi another great success in France’s war against terrorist groups in the Sahel region.

Macron tweeted, “The nation thinks this evening of all its heroes who died for France in the Sahel region in the Serval and Barkhane operations, and of the grieving families and all the wounded… Their sacrifice was not in vain… With our African, European and American partners, we will continue this fight.”

Terrorist with baccalaureate

Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, who first appeared in 2011, obtained his baccalaureate degree and studied social sciences at Mentouri University in Constantine, Algeria, where he graduated in 1997.

He was born in the city of Laayoune, one of the most important disputed cities in Western Sahara. He belongs to the Raqibat tribe to a wealthy merchant family who fled the city to refugee camps in Algeria.

Sahrawi was an activist in the separatist Polisario Front and was an official in the Youth Union of Saguia El-Hamra and the Oued Ed-Dahab, which is close to Polisario. His name began to be widely circulated about ten years ago after he became one of the leaders of the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, one of the groups linked to al-Qaeda, which controlled northern Mali at the time.

From northern Mali, he led terrorist movements, specifically after the Tuareg rebellion, as the country entered into a security crisis and the atmosphere became fertile for terrorist movements.

With his gunmen, Sahrawi enforced Sharia law for about a year, making headscarves compulsory for women, enforcing the cutting off of thieves’ hands, and banning music, sports, alcohol and tobacco.

Allegiance to ISIS

In May 2015, the Al-Mourabitoun organization published an audio recording of Sahrawi in which he said, “The Al-Mourabitoun group announces its allegiance to the Commander of the Faithful and the Caliph of the Muslims, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for the necessity of the group and the rejection of division and difference.” But his former companion Mokhtar Belmokhtar announced that the Al-Mourabitoun  remained loyal to its former affiliation with al-Qaeda, before the Al-Mourabitoun broadcast earlier an audio speech of the Egyptian terrorist Hisham Ashmawi, who was executed by the competent authorities in Egypt in terrorism cases in March 2020, describing Sahrawi as the “Amir of Al-Mourabitoun.”

Although Sahrawi declared allegiance to ISIS in 2015, ISIS did not announce the acceptance of the pledge of allegiance by the Sahrawi fighters and did not recognize their affiliation with it at that time.

After several months passed and the successive defeats of ISIS, which inflicted heavy losses on the terrorist organization, Baghdadi, who was killed in October 2019, recognized Sahrawi as the new ISIS wolf in Africa and praised him, according to several reports of research institutions monitoring terrorist groups, including US Military Academy at West Point and the International Center for Countering Extremism, due to the terrorist attacks the group launched on a gendarmerie station in Burkina Faso in late 2016.

Terrorist operations

During his appearance in the Sahara, Sahrawi established what is known as the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, which kidnapped three European citizens in the Sahel region, but at that time he did not announce his affiliation to any party or organization.

On March 3, 2012, the Sahrawi group carried out a car bomb attack in the city of Tamanrasset in southern Algeria, injuring 23 people, in addition to declaring the execution of Algerian diplomat Tahar Touati after he was kidnapped from his country’s consulate in Gao, one of the largest cities in northern Mali.

After these operations, Sahrawi disappeared for several months, before reappearing again and declaring that he was affiliated with al-Qaeda and follows the path of its current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

About a year later, Sahrawi and Belmokhtar announced the establishment of the Al-Mourabitoun in the Sahel, Sahara and Libya.

Under the leadership of Sahrawi, ISIS, which is spread along the border between Mali and Niger, carried out a series of terrorist attacks. The most effective operation took place on October 4, 2017, targeting a joint patrol between the United States and Niger in the Tongo Tongo region in Niger and near the Malian border, which resulted in the killing of four American soldiers and four Nigerian soldiers.

The terrorist operations carried out by Sahrawi under the umbrella of ISIS prompted him to be classified in May 2018 as a global terrorist.

In October 2019, the US State Department offered a reward of up to $5 million for information on Sahrawi after he was blacklisted.

For years, Sahrawi retained the right to collect zakat, sometimes raising the slogan “threat and execution.”