The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) made public, last Friday, an arrest warrant against Iyad Ag Ghali, emir of the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM), the most important branch of Al-Qaeda in the Sahel.
This arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed in northern Mali from 2012 to 2013, was actually issued on July 18, 2017, but under seal, that is to say that only the France and the Malian authorities have been informed. The ICC therefore hoped that French troops, engaged at the time in the Sahel alongside the Malian army as part of the military operation known as “Barkhane”, would get their hands on Iyad Ag Ghali.
Moreover, the former prosecutor of the ICC, the Gambian Fatou Bensouda, had justified this secret procedure of the sealed warrant by the need to avoid that a “other state» does not thwart the arrest of Iyad Ag Ghali, by reinforcing the protection he already grants him. However, this “other” State which the ICC does not designate by name, but which it clearly suspects of protecting a wanted terrorist leader, is obviously none other than Algeria.
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During his visit to Algeria on December 6, 2017, just a few months after his election, French President Emmanuel Macron clearly demanded from the Algerian authorities, represented by the strong man of the regime at the time, namely General Gaid Salah , chief of staff of the army and deputy minister of Defense, to stop serving as a rear base for Iyad Ag Ghali, whose men are accused of committing inhumane acts in northern Mali. He thus reiterated the same requests made by his predecessor at the Élysée, François Hollande, to whom French intelligence presented proof of the protection provided by the Algiers regime to the leaders of terrorist groups operating in the Sahel, including Iyad Ag Ghali .
Against the latter, the charges today brought by the ICC rival each other in seriousness and range from the summary execution of dozens of Malian soldiers taken prisoner, to “imprisonment or other form of serious deprivation of physical liberty, rape and sexual slavery, but also persecution for religious reasons, as well as persecution of women and girls for sexist reasons», Lists the ICC press release.
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The French troops engaged in Mali since January 2013 (operation Serval replaced by Barkhane in August 2014) were all the more inclined to execute the ICC arrest warrant and to track down Iyad Ag Ghali since the latter is the instigator of numerous kidnappings. of Western nationals, French in particular, taken hostage with demands for ransoms in return for their release. More serious, most of the money from these ransoms circulated in Algeria, on the basis of press releases from the Algerian army, which claims to have seized it from terrorists arrested in the far north of Algeria. . However, we know that a good part of these ransoms paid to terrorist groups operating in Mali always fall into the hands of Algerian generals, who, to avoid being confused through the traceability of bundles of euro notes handed over to terrorists, rush to transform them into loot recovered during anti-terrorist operations in the so-called Algerian maquis located on the Mediterranean coast, thousands of kilometers from northern Mali.
But this other source of enrichment for the mafia of Algerian generals eventually dried up as the French army eliminated almost all the Algerian emirs who led terrorist groups in Mali, emirs having previously served in the fractions of the Armed Islamist Group (GIA) that the Algerian generals manipulated with a view to committing their crimes of the black decade in 90.
Read also: Terrorism in the Sahel: Algerian intelligence services met Iyad Ag Ghali, leader of GSIM
Thus, the French army in Mali killed, among others, the emirs Djamel Okacha in 2019, Abdelmalek Droukdel in 2020, Yahia Djouadi in 2022, Abdelhamid Abou Zeid in March 2023, not to mention the terrorist leader from the Polisario and trained in the Tindouf camps, Adnane Abou El Walid Essahraoui, killed in 2021… Only Iyad Ag Ghali has so far managed to escape this hunt, by taking refuge in Algeria, in Tinzawaten, the common name of two small twin towns which face each other from two sides of the Algerian-Malian border.
By deciding last Friday to make public the arrest warrant against Iyad Ag Ghali, the ICC therefore appears to be addressing the Algerian regime directly with a view to demanding that this terrorist leader be arrested and delivered to the court in The Hague.
In its press release dated June 21, the ICC asked the court registrar “to prepare a request for cooperation in the arrest and surrender of the suspect, and to address it to the competent authorities of any relevant State and/or any other relevant authority».
Read also: Terrorism in the Sahel: Algerian intelligence services met Iyad Ag Ghali, leader of GSIM
However, given that the ICC had given an exclusive mandate to arrest Iyad Ag Ghali to French troops, who are no longer present in Mali, and that the Malian army, with the help of Russian paramilitaries from the Wagner group, has extended its authority over the whole of northern Mali, all that remained was to make public the arrest warrant against the leader of the GSIM, with a view to directly asking the Algerian regime to lift the protection it grants to this terrorist, prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
