
Mokhtar Belmokhtar (1 June 1972-November 2016), also known as Khaled Abou El Abbas, was the leader of the al-Mourabitoun Islamic terrorist group and a former comander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Biography[]
Mokhtar Belmokhtar was born on 1 June 1972 in Ghardaia, Algeria. He traveled to Afghanistan in 1991 to fight against the pro-Soviet Union Democratic Republic of Afghanistan alongside the Mujahideen, and he lost his left eye while mishandling some explosives. When he returned to Algeria, he joined the Armed Islamic Group and fought against the government in the Algerian Civil War. Belmokhtar rose to become a commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, but in December 2012 he was ejected from the organization during the Malian Civil War by the leader Abu Musab Abdel Wadoud for "fractious behavior". He came to command the al-Mourabitoun unit and was responsible for the In Amenas hostage crisis of 16 January 2013, which left at least 37 hostages, a security guard, and 29 militants dead. He justified the attack as revenge for Operation Cerval, France's involvement in the war against the terrorists as an ally of the government of Mali. On 25 February 2013 he was believed dead in a battle with the French Army and Chadian Army in northern Mali at Abou Zeid, although on 23 May 2013 he claimed responsibility for two bombings.
On 14 June 2015, Libya announced that Belmokhtar was killed in a United States airstrike two years after his alleged death. This came a month after a portion of al-Mourabitun pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), weakening his group. However, it was revealed that the strike instead killed several members of Libyan Ansar al-Sharia, and Ansar al-Sharia listed them as leaders of the group but not Belmokhtar. In November 2015 his group killed 19 civilians in an attack on a hotel in Bamako. In November 2016, he was targeted in a French airstrike in Southern Libya, but his death went unconfirmed by the US until 2021.