The Economist, 11 Dec 07: Algeria: A Grisly Attack
Who is killing whom in Algeria, and why? Islamic terrorism against western targets makes a certain kind of sense, and the violence in Iraq has its own grisly logic. But who were the targets of the twin-bombings in Algiers on Tuesday December 11th? One blast killed a busload of university students who happened to be passing by. The other bomb seems to have targeted the offices of the United Nations Development Programme, one of the more apolitical of the organisation’s many bodies.

Algeria has suffered a spate of violence in the past year. This has usually been explained as a hangover from Algeria’s particularly brutal civil war in the 1990s. But the nature of Tuesday’s attack suggests a more worrying culprit: an alliance, announced last year, between local Islamic terrorists and al-Qaeda. Nearly simultaneous multiple bombings, aimed at maximising terror rather than hitting specific political targets, has become a calling card of the international terrorist group....
The Long War Journal, 11 Dec 07: Al Qaeda hits UN offices, courts, police station in Algiers
....Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb most certainly conducted the Algiers bombings. The mode of attack - coordinated bombings against government and international institutions designed to inflict massive casualties and maximum media coverage - is al Qaeda's specialties. The North African branch of al Qaeda has taken credit for similar strikes in the past.

On April 11, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took credit for a pair of coordinated suicide bombings in the capital. A powerful bomb was detonated outside the headquarters of Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem's headquarters in Algiers, and another blast occurred outside the headquarters of the security forces.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took credit for two suicide attacks in Algeria over the course of three days in September. The first attack targeted the Algerian president during a visit to the town of Batna while the second attack targeted a coast guard barracks in Dellys in eastern Algeria. At least 69 were killed and 154 were wounded in the suicide bombings.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is the result of Al Qaeda's efforts to unite the various Salafist terror groups in North Africa and stems from the merger of the Algerian Salafist Group for Prayer and Combat (GSPC), the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and the Tunisian Combatant Group. The GSPC forms the nucleus of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.....