Mokhtar Belmokhtar: the 'uncatchable' chief of Africa's Islamic extremists

Evrard Somda, the commander of Burkina Faso’s specialist anti-terrorism squad, reached Avenue Kwame Nkrumah in the centre of Ouagadougou, the west African nation’s capital, at about 8.30pm on Friday and realised immediately there was only one course of action.

Gunfire and smoke filled the air. A cafe favoured by expatriates was in flames. Around an hour earlier, dozens had died after gunmen opened fire on the crowded terrace with automatic rifles and then moved through the dining room, coolly reloading their weapons and executing survivors.

Now the killers were thought to be in the nearby Splendid hotel, holding an unknown number of guests.

Somda had been trained to try to contact hostage takers. But the carnage made clear any effort to communicate with these gunmen was useless.

“For them it wasn’t a problem to die,” Somda said.

Nine hours later, three of the attackers were finally cornered in a nearby restaurant and shot dead when they emerged to charge an armoured vehicle. French officials have said three other men escaped. Few doubt who is behind the attack, which left 30 people from a dozen different nations dead: Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the most infamous Islamic extremist commander in Africa.

Belmokhtar’s scarred face has been known to western security services for around a decade. But the violent career of the 43-year-old one-eyed militant is much longer, spanning the major phases of the evolution of contemporary Islamic extremism.

The son of a shopkeeper from a small town in central Algeria on the margins of the Sahara, Belmokhtar travelled to Afghanistan in the early 1990s. Too late to fight the Soviets, he arrived just as international veterans of that conflict were turning their attentions to their homelands across the Islamic world.

Through the 1990s, Belmokhtar fought with the savage Groupe Islamique Armée, which spearheaded a brutal insurgency in Algeria, and then helped found a successor group, the Groupe Salafiste de Prédication et le Combat. He also established relations with Osama bin Laden, then based in Afghanistan, who as the founder of al-Qaida hoped to enlist the younger man in his new “global” campaign of terrorism.