By Nick Tattersall
DAKAR, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Uprisings by Tuareg nomads in Niger and Mali may be destabilising the southern Sahara but there is little evidence to suggest direct links to Islamist militants also active in the world's biggest desert.
Tuareg-led rebels have launched attacks on military targets in the remote north of both countries in recent months, killing soldiers and civilians and taking hostages to demand more development for the impoverished region.
Although neither insurgency has officially declared links to the other, they echo uprisings in the early 1990s when the light-skinned nomads launched full-scale rebellions against black African-dominated governments in both Bamako and Niamey.
Peace deals brought an end to major hostilities more than a decade ago but the region remains awash with arms, largely beyond government control and full of unemployed youths.
Security experts fear this makes prime recruiting ground for Islamist militants.
Salafist insurgents from Algeria, Tablighi clerics from Pakistan and Wahabist missionaries from Saudi Arabia -- all seen as potential threats by Western intelligence services -- have tried to gain a foothold in the region in recent years.
By and large, they have failed.
"Mali was Islamicised hundreds of years ago in the 11th-13th centuries and the form of Islam that has developed here is very devout, very tolerant, very open to dialogue with other civilisations," said one Western diplomat in Bamako.
FRONT AGAINST TERROR
The main militant threat in the Sahara is seen as al Qaeda's North African wing, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which grew out of Algeria's civil war in the 1990s and was formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).
The group claimed responsibility for two suicide attacks in Algeria this month, which killed at least 57 people. Its second-in-command called in a video last week for north African Muslims to "cleanse" their land of Spaniards and French.
U.S. military officials and diplomats say the group is active in Mali and has in the past used Mauritania and Niger to host mobile training camps, often believed to consist of little more than a few jeeps gathered round a watering hole where recruits learn to use satellite phones, explosives and guns.
Many Tuareg are distrustful of the U.S. special forces who have been training armies around the Sahara in recent years to locate and destroy such camps. A U.S. military plane resupplying Malian soldiers at the garrison town of Tin-Zaouatene was hit by small arms fire from Tuareg rebels this month.
But they appear to be equally suspicious of the Salafists.
The Algerian militants are seen as trying to introduce a foreign and violent form of Islam. Tuareg rebels clashed with the then GSPC in the Malian desert last year.
"We are a Muslim society, but we condemn the presence of the GSPC in our lands and we are very angry with the government for the laxness with which it let it set up," Malian rebel leader Hassan Fagaga said at the time. Fagaga later rejoined government ranks, but army officials say he defected again last month.
DELICATE BALANCE
Attempts by other foreign forms of Islam to gain influence have also been resisted by Mali and Niger's Tuareg communities.
Wahabist preachers from Saudi Arabia who funded new mosques in the ancient Malian caravan town of Timbuktu wanted one of them to become the main site for Friday prayers, but local Imams recently rejected the proposal, an Islamic expert there said.
A few years ago Pakistani preachers from the Jama'at al-Tabligh missionary society, whose converts include British "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, tried to win over former rebels in Kidal, the seat of Mali's Tuareg insurgencies in the 1960s and 1990s.
Diplomats say they appear largely to have since given up.
The home-grown resistance to Islamic fundamentalism in the southern Sahara has encouraged the United States to boost development aid to the region, instead of focusing simply on a military strategy to combat the threat of extremism.
U.S. military experts have trained armies around the region for several years as part of Washington's Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP). But the United States has also become Mali's largest bilateral donor.
"In the longer term, the development piece (of the equation) is arguably the most important," U.S. ambassador to Mali Terence McCulley told Reuters in an interview early this year.
"That you create economic opportunity and hope and bring people into full participation in a vibrant, moderate Muslim democracy."
