Kidnappings Escalate France's Desert War on al-Qaeda

France may have departed its North African colonies decades ago, but this week the French military dramatically escalated its operations across the region against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). French fighter jets have begun flying sorties over the Sahara Desert in a hunt for five French hostages held by the regional Qaeda affiliate. Prime Minister Francois Fillon has said that his country is now "at war" against AQIM, which first emerged in Algeria but operates across the Sahara belt from Chad to Mauritania. But if this is war, as Fillon says, France could be in for a long fight.

The French escalation was triggered by the kidnapping last Thursday of seven uranium miners in the dirt-poor nation of Niger. The men, who were snatched from their homes in the remote desert north of the country, work for France's state-owned nuclear giant Areva and a subsidiary of the French construction company Vinci. Five of the hostages are French, while the others come from Madagascar and Togo.

In a separate incident before dawn on Wednesday, kidnappers seized three French citizens near a Chinese-operated oil field off the Nigerian coast, from a boat belonging to the Bourbon Group, a French marine-services company. So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the Nigeria action, and there is no apparent connection to France's manhunt underway in the Sahara. But that manhunt in Niger threatens to grow into a major military operation that could spread to other countries around the Sahara. AQIM also announced Wednesday that it had killed 19 Mauritanian soldiers who had been part of an operation against one of its positions in Mali.

France dispatched 80 military personnel to Niger on Sunday to search for the men, and defense officials say they are using a reconnaissance jet and a Mirage fighter to scour the vast desert for any trace of the kidnappers. U.S. officials were quoted as telling the French press agency AFP on Tuesday that France has requested U.S. military help in the search, perhaps by using satellite intelligence.

AQIM claimed responsibility for the Niger kidnapping in a statement broadcast on Tuesday night on Al Jazeera Television, and warned France against the "stupidity" of attempting a military rescue. For days before the kidnapping, French officials had warned of a planned terror attack in France itself; police evacuated the Eiffel Tower one day last week after a bomb scare, and this week authorities raised France's terror alert level to red, the country's second-highest level. As French journalists speculated that the terror scare was aimed to divert attention from President Nicolas Sarkozy's sinking popularity, French national police director Frederic Pechenard said in a radio interview on Wednesday that there was "a specific threat," including possible plans to detonate a bomb in France.

But while France is able to deploy hundreds of armed soldiers to protect Paris tourist sites such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum, battling al-Qaeda militants on their home turf could prove to be a lot more difficult.

The French military is hunting for the hostages in one of the world's most inhospitable regions — the searing Sahara Desert — where borders are porous and tracks or landmarks are few. What is more, AQIM is a loose collection of armed groups whose tactics include banditry and blackmail. Perhaps encouraged by ransom payouts in previous kidnappings, al-Qaeda groups have over the past year launched ever-more frequent abductions of foreigners. "It's as an ideal mechanism to generate much-needed funds and deter foreign investment in countries they accuse of associating with the West," says Alastair Cameron, head of the European Security Program for the Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank in London. "There's obvious propaganda value in kidnapping foreigners." Aside from money, AQIM has ideological motivations, too, targeting European policies such as the recent French ban on Muslim women wearing the burqa in public.

Combating AQIM will require intense intelligence gathering, say analysts, since groups regularly move across huge distances, often with little contact with locals. "Groups strike and then vanish into the desert," says Jean-Luc Marret, senior fellow with the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. "It's the classic way of waging attacks in the desert." Those were the tactics last July when al-Qaeda militants kidnapped Michel Germaneau, a 78-year-old French aid worker in Niger, and then drove him across the border into Mali, home of one of AQIM's most militant branches. The kidnappers killed Germaneau after Mauritanian military forces, backed by French special forces, launched a joint rescue operation.

French officials believe the Niger hostages have also been taken to the desert in northern Mali, and are considering whether an all-out rescue operation might provoke further attacks, or result in the murder of the hostages. Several previous European hostages have been freed after negotiations and suspected ransom payments. "Until now the strategy has been discreet, with special ops and a lot of human intelligence," Marret says. "Now it is much more visible, and we might have some victims among hostages, French military and local forces."

Curiously, Areva had ample warning of an al-Qaeda attack. Two weeks before the kidnapping, a local police commander in northern Niger faxed a letter to French companies in the area, warning them that al-Qaeda seemed to be planning an assault on foreign workers — Niger's police had apprehended eight Toyota trucks filled with armed men in late August. Despite the warning, French television footage this week showed that Areva's compound in Arlit had no security walls or armed security guards, and there was no evacuation of foreigners.

Areva's uranium mining operations in Niger are of crucial importance to the local economy, and to France. About half of France's nuclear energy derives from Niger's huge uranium deposits, and French uranium trade accounts for about 75% of revenue in Niger, whose per capita annual income is just $353. That gives both countries a strong incentive for a quick, bloodless end to the kidnap. Unfortunately, the region's al-Qaeda militants are just as aware of that need to settle quickly.