Questionable Job Performance Evaluation

"Here we must ask, who handled this important abduction poorly? ... Does it come from the unilateral behaviour along the lines of our brother Abu Abbas, which produced a blatant inadequacy: Trading the weightiest case (Canadian diplomats!!) for the most meagre price (700,000 euros)!!
"Rather than walking alongside us in the plan we outlined, he managed the case as he liked."
North African Branch, al-Qaeda

"Your letter ... contained some amount of backbiting, name-calling and sneering," they write. "We refrained from wading into this battle in the past out of a hope that the crooked could be straightened by the easiest and softest means. ... But the wound continued to bleed, and in fact increasingly bled, until your last letter arrived, ending any hope of stanching the wound and healing it." 

My, such a querulous, dissatisfied, slandering note of grievance. What might have occasioned such bitterness? That the ransom of a United Nations Niger-employed diplomat of Canadian provenance was insufficient unto the purpose of releasing him back to his country of origin? Tut-tut, shouldn't have made the deal. Shouldn't have entrusted the making of the deal to their own version of a black sheep, someone who wasn't a team player, chafed at taking orders he had no wish to comply with.

So Robert Fowler and his colleague Louis Guay were freed from captivity, from the misery of their forced incarceration by a band of desert jihadists who pay for their operations, their costly purchases of arms, by such abductions and consequent ransoms. Abductions which the world deplores, and most particularly those countries whose nationals have been targeted, and for whom to gain release they pay through the nose.

Insisting vehemently all the while that they paid nothing; it was simply an act of altruism that somehow struck the abductors, feeling badly that they had discommoded those whose lives they made miserable, and simply released them out of the goodness of their shrivelled, black little hearts. Heaven knows, in all likelihood Canadians might have seen a better use of $1-million than to waste it on rescuing Robert Fowler from his misery.

Robert Fowler has often demonstrated his gratitude to the country and to the Conservative government, in power at the time and whose decision it must have been to bring him on home, by sharp criticism and ongoing blame for anything and everything that he doesn't, in his great, good wisdom, agree with. That, of course, is a story other than the one that has led al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to have their 14-member Shura Council moan about being short-changed.

The voluminous letter setting out the Shura Council's disgust with the actions of Moktar Belmoktar, a petty-criminal-minded jihadist they were evidently incapable of controlling to their satisfaction, affirms that ransom payments derived from governments seeking to free their captured citizens are indeed used for the purchase of arms, enabling them to carry out attacks against the very governments that have awarded them the cash to begin with.

It's even likely that some of the arms dealers they do business with are ensconced in those very same European countries.

Life is complicated.

The leaders, in the letter, vent their outrage against Belmoktar who decided in high dudgeon to have no further truck with the group, in any event. And he set out to form his own terrorist group. With some spectacular results, since his was the jihadist group  - including two Canadian Muslims - that planned the largest hostage-taking yet, at the BP-operated In Amenas gas field in Algeria.
aired Al-Qaeda’s dirty linen in public, in online jihadist forums.

A still image broadcast by Algeria's Ennahar TV on January 19, 2013 shows hostages surrendering to Islamist gunmen who overtook a gas facility in Tiguentourine near In Amenas in the south of the country. (AFP Photo / Ennahar TV)

And just to prove that this was no one-off where he got lucky, planned and carried out simultaneous bombings in Niger last week, at a military base, and at a French uranium mine. Could be that al-Qaeda could use Belmoktar's expertise, after all. They might consider begging him to reconsider and return to the fold and use his bold sense of attack-and-atrocities to their further advantage.