Banditry and rebellion in Niger

When Mohamed Latey shot dead the local police lieutenant and stole his truck, he believed he was fighting for the freedom of his fellow nomads in the Sahara.
It was the height of the Tuareg rebellion in the early 1990s, a four-year insurgency by a pale-skinned minority in remote northern Niger who felt sidelined and persecuted by a black elite governing from a capital 1,000 km (620 miles) away.
Its fighters have long since handed over their mortars, anti-tank mines and grenade launchers, but resentment is still strong in a region synonymous with banditry and smuggling.
"The state hasn't kept its promises, so some ex-fighters decided to go and find money for themselves," said Latey, 31, his face lit by the moon as he poured a glass of sweet tea.
"For them, banditry and rebellion are one and the same. Someone who has no money, who has had nothing in his pocket for months, is going to go where he can find some."
The United Nations has tightened travel restrictions for its staff around Agadez, an ancient Saharan trading town, and Niger's army is about to deploy a special US-trained company of 150 soldiers to fight outlaws in the region.
Washington fears the history of poverty and rebellion makes fertile recruiting ground for what it says are terrorists. Some see the Sahel region on the southern fringe of the desert as a secondary front in its war on terror, drawing parallels with Afghanistan.
"We have noticed patterns of trafficking, illegal activity - there is potential interaction between various groups," said a senior US official in the capital, Niamey.
"Up to this point they have mostly been isolated cases of banditry, but the situation provides the potential for other kinds of action."
REBELS WITH A CAUSE? Armed robbery is on the rise on the sand swept roads around Agadez, locals say, and some even talk of a new insurgency.
Three civilians were killed and two military police officers, or gendarmes, abducted a few weeks ago when bandits machine-gunned a bus on the main route towards Algeria and Libya.
Four bandits and a gendarme were killed at the start of the month in an ambush on the same road, taking the number of attacks around Agadez to 11 since June.
Around 3,000 former combatants are still without jobs or cash in the region's vast swaths of desert - the fault of the government, they say, which had promised to help integrate them into society after they laid down their weapons.
The government in Niamey admits more could be done to integrate former rebels, some of whom have already been given jobs in the security forces under a 1995 peace deal brokered by Burkina Faso, Libya and former colonial power France.
"Certainly we could do better with social integration, but it demands enormous means which we do not have," Niger's Defence Minister, Hassane Souley, said.
Although most of the reported attacks are cases of simple robbery, one pocket of bandits has a political axe to grind.
They are fighting for the release of former tourism minister Rhissa Ag Boula, a prominent Tuareg arrested in February in connection with the murder of a government official.
EASY MONEY Sitting around a small charcoal stove in a mud-brick courtyard on the edge of Agadez, Latey and three more former rebels said good money can be made selling stolen Toyota jeeps over the border in Libya. Tourists and aid agencies are the favourite targets, because their cars tend to be new.
"It's how they make their living. A new Land Cruiser will fetch 6-7 million CFA francs ($11,200-$13,000) in Libya. I have a lot of friends who have done it," said Latey.
"It only takes three people to take over a car, to hijack it with a pistol or Kalashnikov. That's all you need."
Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who pass through Agadez in search of a better life in the Maghreb or Europe are another easy target on one of the world's oldest smuggling routes.
"There are bandits on camels or in Toyota trucks, five or so in each, with AKs," said Ibrahim Bohari, 32, who has made the 40-day trip on the back of a huge truck to the Libyan town of Sabha several times to trade goods.
"They search the bags. If they see anything they want, they take it. A camera, a television, a good pair of shoes," he said.
TERRORISTS, REBELS OR BANDITS? US military experts have been training local soldiers in Mauritania, Mali and Chad, as well as Niger, to root out and kill militants as part of the State Department's Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorist Initiative (TSCTI).
The main concern is fundamentalist preachers from groups such as the al Qaeda linked Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), Algeria's last powerful rebel force, seeking out new converts in a traditionally moderate region.
Officials admit the distinction between bandits seeking riches and militants looking for new followers is becoming blurred as they try to impose security on the Sahara.
"The passage from one to the other is easy. Both are an attack on the sovereignty of the state. Bandits or terrorists, for us it's the same," said Defence Minister Souley.
However the young Tuareg ex-rebels in Agadez say they have no relationship with the Salafists, whose cause they see as distinct from their own.
They fear the increased military activity means they risk being mistaken for terrorists, but they remain resolute.
"A young man who is strong, who knows the desert, who knows how to drive, is not going to let himself be overcome by poverty," said Mohamed Ghoumour, 26, who left college to fight with his fellow Tuaregs as a teenager.
"If today the state thinks it has resolved things they are wrong. If nothing is done we'll go back to our old work - fighting a rebellion," he said.