The western media missed a rare victory against terrorists in Algeria last week — but danger is still on the horizon.
Richard Laurent
On December 1 media outlets in Algeria, citing anonymous sources, reported that security forces had foiled a terrorist plan to attack an airport in the country’s south. The plot, they reported, was the work of Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group Al Mourabitoun. If true, this was a significant coup: Al Mourabitoun’s founder is Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the mastermind of the 2013 attack on the In Amenas gas facility, in which around 800 workers were taken hostage, and the man behind November’s attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali.
Algeria’s long-serving president, 78-year-old Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has been a diminished and incapacitated presence since suffering a stroke in 2013, creating what the leading opposition figure calls a “power vacuum” and making this already-fragile state an exceptionally attractive target for terrorism. This is a prospect the whole world should be worried about, given the disintegration of Libya to the east and the emerging need for the Islamic State to seek footholds away from airstrike-hit Syria and northern Iraq. A victory — any victory — over the country’s most feared terrorist leader would represent a major step forward for Algerian forces as they attempt to maintain control of the country.
Why, then, did the western media miss this piece of news completely? Look through the mainstream press — or any press — in the developed world and you will find not one mention of the foiled attack. In fact, the episode appears to have received no coverage beyond a handful of newspapers in North Africa. The biases loaded into the western media’s coverage of terrorism and terrorist incidents have become a subject of furious debate in the wake of the Paris attacks; was this another example of the developed world ignoring events in less privileged countries because it only cares about places “close to home”? That may be part of the reason, but the more likely explanation is that unsuccessful attacks simply don’t garner attention the way successful ones do. And there’s another factor to consider: The Algerian security forces may have inflated the threat to appear tough. There’s certainly form when it comes to Algerian authorities and misinformation: They have, for example, incorrectly pronounced Belmokhtar dead on several occasions over the past five years. Many African intelligence specialists believe Belmokhtar was indeed killed in a drone strike earlier this year, but we don’t know for sure. Mysteries abound.
Did the Algerian authorities actually foil an attack on December 1? And how strong is the threat of further attacks by Al Mourabitoun over the months ahead? To find out, Predata built a model to retrospectively analyze trails of evidence left online — in places such as Wikipedia and YouTube — around the threat posed by Al Mourabitoun and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Belmokhtar broke away from al-Qaeda in 2013, but Al Mourabitoun has long been bundled with the larger organization; on Thursday the two groups announced their amalgamation. To successfully track rogue non-state actors such as these, it’s important to monitor the social and collaborative media where they live, plotting and celebrating and reliving successful attacks. Old-fashioned, on-the-ground, person-to-person human and signals intelligence isn’t enough; modern terrorism has a deep digital presence, which demands smarter and better ways to keep track of what’s happening online.
Our model reveals that there was a significant spike in the volatility of conversation online in the days leading up to both the Radisson Blu raid and the foiled airport attack:
These spikes were driven largely by activity on the English- and Arabic-language Wikipedia pages for Al Mourabitoun. To gauge the robustness of our model, we backtested it over the last year against a field of events, including six terror attacks, related to AQIM. Setting the prediction window at 45 days, the model successfully raised the alarm of an imminent terror attack 67% of the time (note, however, the model did not specify the exact time, location or type of any of these attacks). On the day before the Radisson Blu attack in Bamako, the model put the likelihood of an attack within the next 45 days at 100%; on November 30, on the eve of the purported airport raid, the probability was at 76%. The model is consistent in showing an elevated (and escalating) likelihood of attack in the days leading up to past terrorist events; on this basis, we conclude that Algerian security forces were not exaggerating and they did indeed thwart the attack on December 1 as they’ve claimed.
On the day following the Bamako attack, the probability level in our model dropped to 14%. But today, the situation is different. Despite the rare victory of the Algerian security forces in heading off this latest threat, Predata continues to show a high likelihood of an AQIM attack within their operational footprint, which includes Algeria, Mali, Mauritania and Niger; late last week, we put the probability that AQIM will strike within the next 45 days at 74%. The attentions of the global media remain fixed on terrorist activity in the heart of the developed world — a mass shooting in California one day, stabbings on the London Tube the next. But it’s important to look beyond what’s already happened to events the internet indicates might still be to come: The developments of the last week, and the union of Al Mourabitoun and AQIM in particular, suggest the threat posed by Belmokhtar and his associates in North Africa deserves far closer attention.
richard@predata.com | twitter: @predataofficial | www.predata.com
