The Global War on Terror in the Sahara
Purchase on AmazonA year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a deployment of American troops was launched across the Sahel region of North Africa. This operation, hugely contested by the local population, was an extension of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) – known as the ‘Pan-Sahel Initiative’. A year later, Washington expanded its footprint in the region through its Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative – drawing five more countries into its grip. This uniquely American operation linked the two oil-rich sides of the Sahara in a complex web of security arrangements enabling the Pentagon to begin what it called a ‘draining of the swamp’.
Professor Jeremy Keenan, who has written more on the Sahara than any other scholar in history and is also a recognised authority on the GWOT, deconstructs America’s GWOT in Africa, incident by incident, to reveal the emergence of a series of operations, based on falsehoods, disinformation – ‘lies’ – and propaganda.
Based on 25 years of detailed, unremitting research in the Sahara-Sahel, and drawing on secret US State Department cables and Hilary Clinton’s private emails, Keenan reveals the intentions behind the machinations of Washington’s GWOT; how leaders of America’s Project for a New American Century, including Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfelt, plotted with the ‘blood-soaked’ generals of Algeria’s secret services to fabricate a series of false-flag operations that led to two genocides (in Niger and Mali), the death of over 25,000 civilians, and the devastation of African countries covering an area the size of Western Europe.
Reviews & critics
In this brilliant and authoritative exposé Jeremy Keenan provides a blistering critique of the West’s devastating ‘war on terror’ in the Sahel. This is a courageous book in which Keenan exposes, in the manner of the great anthropologist he is, the impact of imperialist state crimes on the indigenous inhabitants of the region. This is a story of false flag counter-terrorism, of Tuareg rebellions and US-manufactured Algerian regional hegemony, of Islamic State, coups and violent exploitation. At its heart this is a story of US imperialism in which disinformation, propaganda and deceit are deployed to conceal hegemonic goals and natural resource exploitation. I know of no other scholar as connected and informed as Keenan is about the peoples of the Sahara and the murky world of US and Algerian state crime that daily diminishes their lives. In this outstanding book we are left in no doubt as to who the real terrorists in the Sahara and Sahel are.
Penny Green
Professor of Law and Globalisation
Queen Mary University of London
Founder and Director, International State Crime Initiative
Jeremy Keenan is the one scholar who cannot be fooled about Algeria. Since 1964, he has moved through the Sahara on its own terms — learning its languages, earning the trust of its peoples, and watching with forensic patience as Algeria’s military regime transformed the desert into a theatre of manufactured terror.
This book delivers the definitive account of how the military regime weaponised America’s post-9/11 panic for its own ends. Keenan demonstrates with devastating precision how the regime’s intelligence apparatus fabricated terrorist incidents — including the kidnapping of European tourists in 2003 and the catastrophic In Amenas attack — to serve a ruthless triple agenda: relocating the dangerous residue of Algeria’s 1990s civil war southward into the Sahel, reasserting the regime’s regional hegemony, and crushing domestic opposition under the permanent alibi of counter-terrorism. Washington, blinded by its hunger for African oil and its obsession with building AFRICOM, was a willing accomplice.
The evidence Keenan marshals is formidable: nearly a thousand diplomatic cables from US officials in the field describing a reality their superiors in Washington systematically buried; WikiLeaks documents revealing that Hillary Clinton knew the regime’s prized terrorist asset operated under a secret arrangement with its own military; a decade of fieldwork no other living scholar could replicate.
The military regime lit the fuse. The Sahel is still burning. This book explains why.
Mohamed Larbi Zitout
Former Algerian Diplomat