Author Description

Denying terrorists sanctuary has become a pillar of U.S. defense strategy since the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks. Violent extremist organizations in North Africa, such as the group al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), have used remote and sparsely populated areas in the Sahara for protection from security forces to conduct a range of terrorist activities, such as training, planning, and logistics.1 Despite the time elapsed since the 9/11 attacks and the resources dedicated to denying sanctuary globally, the concept of sanctuary remains largely unexplored and poorly understood. This monograph proposes a functional understanding of sanctuary and offers fresh ideas to deny it using a detailed case study of the most notorious of these North African terrorists, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, from his arrival in Mali in the late 1990s, until the French intervention in early 2013. This interdisciplinary inquiry uses a wide range of open-source documents, as well as anthropological, sociological, and political science research, including interviews with a former Belmokhtar hostage, Ambassador Robert Fowler, to construct a picture of what a day in the life of a Saharan sanctuary-seeking terrorist is like in order to provide further insight into terrorist sanctuary and explore ways and means to deny or control it.