France confirms death of al-Qaeda leader Abou Zeid
An announcement Saturday by the French president’s office that Abou Zeid’s death in late February has been “definitively confirmed” ends weeks of speculation about his fate.
The death of a top al-Qaeda-linked warlord in combat with French-led troops represents a victory in the battle against jihadists who had a stranglehold on northern Mali. But it is far from the defining blow against a wily enemy that can go underground and regroup to renew itself. Even the fearsome Abou Zeid is replaceable.
A top commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Abou Zeid had been in the crosshairs of the French military and their African partners since they moved in to Mali in January to rout radicals seen as a threat to northwest Africa and to Europe. An announcement Saturday by the French president’s office that Abou Zeid’s death in late February has been “definitively confirmed” ends weeks of speculation about his fate.
Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, an Algerian thought to be 47, was a pillar of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s southern realm, responsible for the death of at least two European hostages and a leader of the extremist takeover of northern Mali, which followed a coup d’etat a year ago. He joined a succession of radical insurgency movements in Algeria starting in the early 1990s and became known for his brutality and involvement in high-profile hostage-taking.
President Francois Hollande’s office said the death of Abou Zeid “marks an important step in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel,” the borderlands where the Sahara meets the sub-Saharan jungle, encompassing several nations where radicals are on the rise.
It’s the entire structure that has to be put down and not this or that [al-Qaeda] leader
French officials have maintained for weeks that the Abou Zeid was “probably” dead but waited to conduct DNA tests to verify.
