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Algeria

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, The One-Eyed Jihadist Mastermind Of Algerian Hostage Crisis

Mokhtar Belmokhtar
Mokhtar Belmokhtar
Hélène Sallon et Christophe Châtelot

ALGIERS – On Wednesday, an estimated 41 Western contractors were taken hostage inside the jointly run BP natural-gas facility in Amenas, in eastern Algeria, near the Libyan border.

The man believed to be responsible for this assault goes by the name Mokhtar Belmokhtar – also known as Khaled Aboul Abbas – one of the region's most feared Islamist militants.

A former leader of AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), the charismatic Algerian has been an active Islamist militant for many years. He was born June 1st, 1972, in Ghardaia, 300 miles south of Algiers and trained with the mujahidin in Afghanistan from 1991 to 1993. It was in those training camps that he first met those who would later become the leaders of Al-Qaeda. It was also in Afghanistan that he was hit by shrapnel – causing him to lose his left eye, earning him the nickname “the One-Eyed.”

When he first returned to Algeria in 1993, during the civil war, he was a military chief of the Armed Islamic Group (AIG) fighting government forces. He participated in the launch of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which later became the AQIM. He is believed to be responsible for numerous hostage-takings, including the one leading to the death of two young Frenchmen in Niger in Jan. 2011.

Two to three hundred militants

Belmokhtar’s organization has been based in Gao, northern Mali, for the past few years – at least until the French air force bombed the site on the Jan. 11.

The organization broke away from AQIM in Dec. 2012 to form its own movement – the Signed-in-Blood Battalion. “The Battalion was created by a dissident group or a group that was expelled from AQIM,” believes Dominique Thomas, a specialist in Islamist networks. “The group rallied around their leader, Mokhtar Belmokhtar. With their recently acquired independence, they forged ties with the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA), which controls parts of eastern Mali, Gao and its surroundings,” he says.

This group comprises of 200 to 300 well-trained and heavily armed fighters. “His organization and the MOJWA were able to come to an agreement in Mali but we didn’t think his influence extended to Algeria. But since he is Algerian, he knows the terrain and has contacts,” says Dominique Thomas.

Before leaving the AQIM in 2012, Belmokhtar had said that he wanted to extend his Libyan networks, according to Thomas.

“The past disagreements – a result of incompatible egos – are erased with this operation, which was obviously a combined-effort,” says Thomas.

Belmokhtar has been criticized within his organization for his tendency to adapt to the local environment, notably with smuggling and trafficking. “This ran counter to AQIM’s official line, which represents itself as a virtuous and rigorous group, fighting against trafficking. In truth, though, they too adapt themselves to the local environment.” However, for them, Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s trafficking had become “too organized,” says the specialist.

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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