![[AFP/SITE Monitoring Service] Armed jihadists exchange fire with Malian troops in January.](http://magharebia.com/awi/images/2013/03/26/130326Feature1Photo1-640_413.jpg)
[AFP/SITE Monitoring Service] Armed jihadists exchange fire with Malian troops in January.
By Bakari Gueye in Nouakchott for Magharebia
The appointment of Yahia Abou El Hammam as al-Qaeda newest field commander is stirring discussion in Mauritania.
“He was appointed as AQIM’s new leader for the area extending from Ghardaia in central southern Algeria to the region of Azawad in northern Mali, but he has yet to be confirmed in post at a meeting of the AQIM leadership,” Mohamed Mokeddem, the head of Algeria’s Ennahar TV, said when breaking the news on Sunday (March 25th)
His predecessor Abou Zeid (Mohamed Ghadir), the Tariq ibn Ziyad brigade chief, was killed late last month in Mali’s Ifoghhas mountains, French officials confirmed Saturday.
El Hammam (real name Djamel Oukacha) is a close associate of Abdelmalek Droukdel, noted Jidou Ould Sidi, a journalist specialising in security matters.
Both men belong to the “Algiers Group” of high-ranking terrorists born in the region of the Algerian capital, he added.
Ould Sidi also noted Oukacha’s active role in the war waged by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) against the Algerian government in the 1990s.
“Oukacha travelled to northern Mali in 2004. He was also reportedly a member of the commando that attacked a military barracks in Mauritania in 2005. He is also believed to have been involved in the 2009 murder of US national Christopher Leggett, who was working for an NGO in Mauritania,” he said.
Abou Zeid’s 34-year-old successor rose up AQIM’s ranks very quickly, Ould Sidi said.
“He has not achieved the same prominence as the other leaders of the organisation and lacks the stature of somebody like Mokhtar Belmokhtar.
“This is a convinced jihadist who does not change his position for money,” Le Figaro quoted Geneva Centre for Terrorism Analysis head Jean-Paul Rouiller as saying.
Oukacha also spent 18 months in an Algeria jail in the mid-1990s, and was active in northern Algeria, in the Kabylian region of Tizi Ouzou after leaving the Armed Islamic Group for the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).
“Oukacha’s appointment comes at a difficult time for AQIM, which is watching its own back because of the French and African intervention in northern Mali,” terrorism expert Sidati Ould Cheikh said.
“His priority would certainly be to try to reorganise his troops by scattering them. They are said to have suffered very significant losses of men and equipment. They will also have to find men of the calibre of Abou Zeid and Belmokhtar, who is also reported to be dead,” he added.
But Ould Cheikh pointed out that despite the international military intervention in northern Mali, “the terrorist threat has not gone away”.
