Al-Qaida Tip Sheet on Avoiding Drones Found in Mali

One of the last things the fighters did before leaving this city was to drive to the market where traders lay their carpets out in the sand.

The al-Qaida terrorists bypassed the brightly colored, high-end synthetic floor coverings and stopped their pickup truck in front of a man selling more modest mats woven from desert grass, priced at $1.40 apiece. They bought two bales of 25 mats each and asked him to bundle them on top of the car, along with a stack of sticks.

“It’s the first time someone has bought such a large amount,” said the mat seller, Leitny Cisse al-Djoumat. “They didn’t explain why they wanted so many.”

Military officials can explain why. The fighters are stretching the mats across the tops of their cars on poles to form natural carports so that drones cannot detect them from the air.

The instruction to camouflage cars is one of 22 tips on how to avoid drones, listed on a document left behind by the Islamic extremists as they fled northern Mali from a French military intervention last month.

A Xeroxed copy of the document, which was first published on a jihadist forum two years ago, was found by The Associated Press in a manila envelope on the floor of a building here occupied by al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb.

The tip sheet reflects how al-Qaida’s chapter in North Africa anticipated a military intervention that would make use of drones as the battleground in the war on terror worldwide shifts from boots on the ground to unmanned planes in the air.

The presence of the document in Mali, first authored by a Yemeni, also shows the coordination among al-Qaida chapters, which security experts have called a source of increasing concern.

“This new document … shows we are no longer dealing with an isolated local problem but with an enemy which is reaching across continents to share advice,” said Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, now the director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution.

The tips in the document range from the broad (No. 7: Hide from being directly or indirectly spotted, especially at night) to the specific (No. 18: Formation of fake gatherings, for example, by using dolls and statues placed outside false ditches to mislead the enemy).

The use of the mats appears to be a West African twist on No. 3, which advises camouflaging the tops of cars and the roofs of buildings, possibly by spreading reflective glass.

While some of the tips are outdated or far-fetched, taken together they suggest the Islamists in Mali are responding to the threat of drones with sound, common-sense advice that may help them to melt into the desert in between attacks, leaving barely a trace.

This article appeared in print on page 3 of the February 22nd, 2013 edition of Hamodia.