U.S. forces in Algeria hunting for al-Qaida

WASHINGTON — U.S. special forces are hunting for Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida along Algeria's southern border with Mali in a little-known military operation aimed at destroying a key North African recruiting hub for Osama bin Laden's global terrorist network, according to U.S. and Algerian officials.

Small teams of elite U.S. soldiers have been working with local security forces in recent months in the Sahara Desert in an effort to capture or kill members of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, a radical Islamic organization that has pledged its allegiance to al-Qaida and is suspected in terrorist plots in Europe and the United States, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.

The joint effort marks another front in the war on terrorism and a watershed in U.S.-Algerian relations. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Washington stepped up military assistance to Algiers in its 12-year civil war against Islamic extremist groups. The U.S. military involvement is also part of a larger U.S. antiterrorism campaign in the vast, desolate Sahel region of North Africa — which touches the nations of Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad — that U.S. intelligence officials fear could become a primary training ground for radicals exporting terrorism around the world.

"They send troops in and out and have put up some kind of infrastructure" along the border with Mali, where members of the Algerian-based group are believed to be hiding among local Bedouins and nomadic tribes, a senior Algerian government official said of the U.S. troops.

But U.S. government officials with access to official reports said the U.S. special forces have been working with Algeria and neighboring countries to trap members of the Salafist group, which is on the U.S. terrorism list. The group, also known by its acronym, GSPC, was founded in 1998 at the urging of bin Laden as an offshoot of the Armed Islamic Group, the violent domestic opposition to the Algerian government.

It appears to have eclipsed its parent organization as the country' main Islamic rebel group, while broadening its ties to other militants outside the country, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Many of the group's members, estimated to be as high as 3,000 fighters, are believed to be veterans of bin Laden's Afghanistan training camps.

"Almost all the Al Qaeda cells that have been picked up in Europe have some link to this group," said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism specialist at the Investigative Project, a think tank in Washington. "These are the descendents of the Al Qaeda training camps who have gone home."