PARIS: The decision by the organisers of the Dakar Rally to call off the race just a day before it was due to start was a propaganda coup for the Al Qaeda network, say analysts.

But that was nothing to what might have happened if the race had gone ahead and militants had succeeded in carrying out an attack against it.

Groups in the Al Qaeda network in northern Africa had in recent weeks been planning attacks against French targets during the race’s passage through Mauritania, said sources close to the French intelligence service.

The information, which came from intercepted communications between the groups, suggested that their plans were becoming increasingly specific.

The murder on Dec 24, of four French tourists in Mauritania was stark testimony to the seriousness of the threat, said the same sources.

A Dec 29, statement posted on Islamic websites purporting to come from the Al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb had denounced Mauritania for planning to host the Dakar Rally.

In the statement, the group claimed a deadly attack on a Mauritanian army barracks on Dec 26 – two days after the French tourists were killed.

And the militants also claimed to be authors of a series of attacks in Algeria.

Etienne Lavigne, the director of the rally, said that Al Qaeda statements had specifically mentioned the rally.

Joao Lagos, one of its Portuguese organisers, added: “The threats ‘were not limited to Mauritania but concerned the whole rally’.”

“A threat of this kind is extremely dissuasive because what can you protect in the Dakar rally?” said Gerard Chaliand, a specialist in this kind of armed conflict.

“Just as it is extremely easy to protect any given site, so it is absolutely impossible to protect a route as long and a convoy as disparate,” he added. “It is a very easy victory,” he said.

What Al Qaeda saw as its main “successes” since the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, were the attacks in Madrid and London.

Ten bombs on four early morning commuter trains in Madrid killed 191 people from 13 countries, on March 11, 2004.

The July 7, 2005 bombings of public transport in London killed 56 people, including the four suicide bombers.

Since then however, Al Qaeda had struggled to carry out attacks of the same magnitude on Western targets, said Chaliand: they did not have much to “celebrate”.

“Here is an organisation that has been relentlessly pursued, it produces less offspring that are less well-equipped than it is,” he added – a reference to Al Qaeda’s Branch in the Islamic Maghreb, known previously as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).

“The leaders of Al Qaeda must probably regret having issued their threats too soon and so having been unable to carry out the attack that they had no doubt planned,” said Middle East specialist Jean-Pierre Filiu of Paris’ Science Po university.

“Their ideal scenario, was this permanent countdown, where nobody would have been talking any more about the (rally’s) stage results but where half of the media coverage would have been on how ‘Al Qaeda has not struck yet but will it succeed in striking tomorrow?’,” Filiu added.

“If it did not pass to the act itself, Al Qaeda failed, quite simply because it lives by its capacity to strike out.”

The movement thrived on the coverage it generated, said Filiu, “so it always needs to make the opening of the television news.”

Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri had given Al Qaeda’s group in north Africa a blank cheque for their operations there.

“For Zawahiri 50 per cent of jihad, is the media jihad,” Filiu added.

What they wanted were operations that would have the maximum media impact to offset the very real military reverses that its operations in Iraq and Saudi Arabia had suffered, he said.

“From ‘Al Qaeda Central’s’ point of view, this is not a sign of strength: it is, on the contrary, an admission that any action that will make the lead of the television news is worth taking.”—AFP