From: Huffington Post
WASHINGTON — Sharpened by combat over more than a decade of intense counter-terrorist operations across Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. special operations forces are well-poised to mount a rescue mission if ordered against Islamist terrorists holding Western hostages deep in Algeria’s Eastern desert.
But the extensive U.S. experience in operating against Islamist militant groups offers a sobering caution against any expectations that American commandos could quickly dispatch the al Qaeda-linked terrorists expanding their grip on neighboring Mali and elsewhere in Northern Africa.
Senior U.S. officials have described both the hostage seizure in Algeria and the Islamist rebellion in neighboring Mali as evidence of a metastasizing threat from al Qaeda, with terrorist franchises under the umbrella of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) erupting across parts of Northern Africa and the Middle East from Algeria to Syria. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said this week that the United States should “do whatever we can to try to stop the momentum of AQIM.”
That might include targeting and killing the ringleader of the Algerian group behind the hostage-taking, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a one-eyed militant who fought in Afghanistan and is known as “Mr. Marlboro” for his one-time pastime of smuggling cigarettes. Removing a charismatic terrorist leader can collapse a small, tight-knit organization, especially under the high stress of a hostage situation.
