Africa, Al Qaeda | featured news

A major al-Qaeda base has been dismantled by French forces in the remote mountains of northern Mali, France's Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian says.

France called on Saturday on other world powers to commit money and logistical support for African armies readying their troops to join French soldiers already battling al Qaeda-linked militants in Mali.

An Al Qaeda-linked group has attacked and taken control of a natural gas field partly owned by BP in southern Algeria, taking at least three Americans hostage, a senior intelligence official tells Fox News.

A multimillion-dollar, kidnap-and-ransom industry in West Africa's dry north is funding al-Qaida-linked gunmen dubbed "gangster-jihadists."

U.S. President Barack Obama's "secret wars" against al-Qaida are steadily widening, most notably in Africa, with the U.S. military's Special Forces Operation Command doubling in size and the CIA's strike capabilities undergoing a radical expansion, international analysts said.

They came in Toyota pick-up trucks, dozens of heavily armed masked men, firing machineguns and waving the black flag of al Qaeda as terrified residents and police huddled indoors, and then disappeared again, melting away into the mountains and remote villages of Egypt's Sinai desert.

An al-Qaida-linked Islamist militant group in control of northern Mali stoned to death a couple accused of engaging in extramarital affairs, the group's spokesman said.

Perhaps most of all, it was like a bucket of ice water over the heads of Mali's 15.4 million people, who saw two decades of democracy collapse in just a few hours into what is rapidly becoming an ungovernable hole and a haven for al-Qaida-linked terrorists.

A suicide bomber with explosives strapped under his uniform killed more than 90 people at a military parade rehearsal in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Monday, an attack which will alarm Washington as its involvement in the front-line state deepens.

The United States is assembling a series of secret drone bases for an aggressive campaign against al-Qaida-linked groups in Somalia and Yemen, the Washingon Post reports.