On April 30, 2011, a U.S. Navy SEAL team killed Osama Bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The death of America's number-one enemy of more than a decade was lauded by many as the end of an era, which it was. Seasoned analysts, however, pointed out that while Bin Laden's death was a serious blow to core al Qa'ida, it was not a death knell for the organization as a whole. In recent years, al Qa'ida had evolved and grown increasingly diffuse and disaggregated through franchise operations, pursuing what former U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte described as a “mergers and acquisition strategy” aimed at “acquiring” Salafi jihadist groups across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. With affiliates in Yemen, Iraq, and Somalia, al Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb was one of the key groups that Bin Laden and his deputies had worked to bring into the fold.

AL QA'IDA'S ALLURE

Al Qa'ida's North African franchise was born out of Algeria's bloody civil war of the 1990s. In 1998, after several years of gruesome violence, some of the Islamists waging war against the secular Algerian government left the mainstream Armed Islamic Group to found a group known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Jihad. Although the Algerian civil war was by then in its final stages, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Jihad survived and continued to resist what it considered the illegitimate apostates ruling in the capital, Algiers.

The group was initially headed by a man named Hassan Hattab. From his perch in the Kabylie mountains along the Mediterranean coast to the east of the Algerian capital, Hattab organized attacks against government buildings in Algiers and elsewhere in the name of restoring a purely Islamic government. His efforts found little support among a population that had grown weary of violence after a decade of civil war, however, and ended up having limited overall impact.

Others in the group soon began to look to Bin Laden's movement for support and inspiration. In the post–9/11 world, alignment with al Qa'ida offered the possibility of regeneration through broader attention, recognition, and legitimacy. One of the Algerian group's central figures at the time, Abdelmalek “el-Para,” was viewed by some Westerners as a possible North African Bin Laden.