Alice Hunt Friend, a senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), was the guest speaker at ALLIES’s weekly meeting on November 1. She spoke about the U.S. military presence in Niger. Ms. Friend spoke about Niger in the context of the ambush that left four U.S. soldiers dead on October 4, 2017. She began with the context of the conflicts in and around Niger and Mali. She explained the variety of terrorist groups in the Sahel, narrowing the discussion to focus on Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Most of the members of AQIM originally came from the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (in French, GSPC), an Algerian faction of the Algerian Civil War in the late 1990s that was considered a terrorist group. GSPC relocated to Mali and Niger and quickly integrated with the local Tuareg tribes through intermarriage and trade. In 2007, they became the basis of AQIM.
