Al Qaeda, the group responsible for the September 11th terrorist attacks, is finding a new home in parts of Northern Africa.

According to U.S. security and counter terrorism experts, the group is expanding from Mali and is using kidnappings and other criminal activities to gain funding. They have also quickly adopted Al Qaeda techniques of suicide bombings and roadside bombings, showing they are swift studies. In 2007, the group allegedly attacked the United Nations' headquarters in Algeria, killing 37 people, 17 of them U.N. staff members.

While still mostly based in Mali, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, threatens to destabilize already weakened governments in several countries, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania.

According to the Associated Press:

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is still small and largely isolated, numbering a couple hundred militants based mostly in the vast desert of northern Mali. But signs of stepped-up activity and the group's advancing potential for growth worry analysts familiar with the region.
The rapid recent rise of the al-Qaida group in Yemen - which spawned the Christmas airliner attack - is seen by U.S. officials and counterterrorism analysts as evidence that the North African militants could just as quickly take on a broader jihadi mission and become a serious threat to the U.S. and European allies.

So what is the U.S. response to this growing threat?You guessed it: The United States is funneling $5 million worth of trucks and other equipment to Mali's security forces. The Pentagon has also provided money to train Mali security forces.

Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center and a former CIA officer, told the Associated Press that the group is potentially more dangerous than the Yemeni faction, because it has a broader area and larger Islamic population from which to recruit. The group has already started pulling recruits from Mauritania, Nigeria and Chad, training them in weaponry and bomb-making techniques and sending them home to reap havoc. The group has served as a pool for recruits to fight the United States in Iraq.

"Now, if it is beginning to reorganize, recruit and develop, because of this international potential, it could become a much more dangerous threat," Riedel said. "And if there is a role model in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, that is very disturbing."

This is a bad, but typical U.S. move. Instead of pushing to limit the pool of potential recruits, we move to help the government suppress them through violence. It is a process that will actually work against U.S. goals. The government in Mali will begin cracking down on these groups, using U.S. techniques and equipment purchased with U.S. taxpayer money. There could be inhumane treatment involved.

Al-Qaida, in the Islamic Maghreb, will use the attacks as further proof that the United States hates Muslims and recruit more restless young men as a result. Instead of using $5 million to fund violence, we should funnel that money to improve people's living conditions and create schools. We should help those weakened governments to provide alternatives for their people to drug trafficking and kidnapping, which may be as much about earning money and soothing hunger as ideological disputes with the United States.

Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence told Aol Black Voices that while doing things like developing a coordinated response to kidnapping and tracing the flow of funds are important parts of the solution, training security forces cannot be the only answer.

"If we are only going to pump up security forces and not help with counter radicalization we will have a problem," said Levitt. "There are target populations that would benefit from counter radicalization activities such as competing for the space and message, development projects and political reform. Together, they create a cumulative effect that targets the ingredients that create the menu of radicalization."

Levitt said that many of those involved in North Africa are already calling for some of these measures because of the potential for this group to step up their activities in places like Israel to try and gain attention from Al Qaeda's core.

At a recent conference about Al-Qaida, in the Islamic Maghreb, Ambassador Vicki Huddleston, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Africa, U.S. Department of Defense, said the marginalized, disenfranchised populations in the region serve as "fuel to drive this organization."

The U.S. should be working on ways to end the fuel source.