As fighters from militant groups based in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia transfer from one theater to other “hot” conflict zones, they are able to share their experiences and skills with a newer, younger generation of militants. Militants who are European citizens are uniquely valuable in this form of knowledge transfer because their passports allow them to travel with less scrutiny than non-Europeans. The recently made public story of Moez Garsallaoui, a Tunisian-born Swiss citizen who became the amir of Jund al-Khilafah and mentored the French citizen of Algerian descent Mohammed Merah, exemplifies how this knowledge transfer works and how it can help internationalize otherwise nationally or regionally-oriented militant groups.

BACKGROUND: On October 15, 2012, a posting on the shmukh al-Islam online Jihadist forum eulogized Garsallaoui as a “hero of heroes of the ummah.” His wife was Malika al-Aroud, whose first husband, Dahmane Abd al-Sattar, was the Tunisian-born al-Qaeda operative who pretended to be a journalist in order to access the Afghanistan Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before September 11. His aide, pretending to be a cameraman, detonated explosives hidden in the camera, killing Massoud, al-Sattar and the cameraman in Takhar Province, Afghanistan on September 9.

Garsallaoui was tech-savvy and ran jihadist websites with al-Aroud in Switzerland, but he also had the ambition to become an al-Qaeda legend like al-Aroud’s first husband. In early 2008, Garsallaoui used his Swiss passport and his wife’s connections to militants in Pakistan to travel to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where he participated in al-Qaeda-run training camps in the region. Within months, he sent home to al-Around a picture of himself with a rocket-propelled grenade and told her that he had killed several Americans.

Garsallaoui resurfaced in October and December 2011, when he released one online posting criticizing the democratic transition in his native Tunisia and a second posting praising Jund al-Khilafah (JaK), an al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group based in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions, whose three founders were from Kazakhstan and whose mission was to overthrow the government of Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan. JaK carried out three attacks in Atyrau, Taraz and Almaty in late 2011 and issued several statements about overthrowing Nazarbayev.

In March 2012, JaK unexpectedly issued a statement on an al-Qaeda online forum claiming Mohammed Merah’s attacks in southwest France, which killed 3 Jews and 4 French paratroopers of North African descent. In a second statement, “Abu Qaqa al-Andalusi” – a common pseudonym for North Africans – claimed to have known “the brother (Merah) up close, and sat with him on many occasions and for a short time guided him.” Before Merah was killed by police in southwest France, he told the French security forces during the negotiations for him to surrender that he had been encouraged to launch an attack in France by an al-Qaeda leader who had been to France. Western intelligence sources have now revealed that it was Garsallaoui who trained the three Kazakh founders of JaK as well as Merah, both of which have committed deadly attacks in Kazakhstan and France, respectively.

IMPLICATIONS: Garsallaoui was not only responsible for training JaK – and then becoming JaK’s amir – but also inspiring Mohammed Merah to carry out attacks in France. Other European militants are similarly changing the orientation of militant groups in Central Asia. The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), which was formerly known as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), for example, used to be focused on Xinjiang, China and “liberating” the region from Communist Chinese rule. While it still maintains this goal, it has now become equally enmeshed in fighting the Americans in Afghanistan, as well as promoting militancy in other theatres such as Chechnya and Turkey. Recent TIP propaganda, for example, has featured Russians and Turks – not Uyghurs – who do not talk about China, but rather about the need for Russians and Turks, including women, to join the jihad in Afghanistan.

In other cases, the introduction of foreign fighters into Central Asia has expanded certain groups’ interest in and awareness of other “hot” theatres. For example, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) was principally focused on Uzbekistan before 2001 and later became focused on fighting the Pakistani army and the U.S. in Afghanistan during the 2000s, since it was closely allied to the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistani (TTP). However, the latest propaganda statement on October 19 issued by the IMU’s mufti Abu Zar al-Burmi, an ethnic Rohingya from Burma by origin, said, “In Mali, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Somalia, there is a jihad going on, dear brothers. This is the victory of us - the mujahideen.” The video in which al-Burmi’s statement appeared was notable for being one of the rare times that sub-Saharan Africans, who were reportedly Somalis, were seen in Afghanistan fighting alongside the Central Asian insurgents.

Many battle-hardened militants will be leaving Afghanistan when most U.S. troops withdraw from the country in 2014. As al-Burmi noted, the “hot” theater today is in Mali, where an insurgency led by a coalition of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and two other militias control the northern two-thirds of the country. Already Pakistanis and Frenchmen, among other nationalities, have been reported among the insurgents, and more will likely join as Western countries and West African countries, as expected, launch a military intervention in 2013.

Central Asians are now some of the most experienced militants after having fought for more than ten years in Afghanistan, so they will likely be able to bring expertise and ideological “mentorship” to the young insurgents in northern Mali, just as Garsallaoui provided to the JaK founders and Merah, who arrived in Pakistan sometime in 2011, when Garsallaoui was already a three-year veteran. Moreover, fighters who travel to foreign countries outside of their native region to fight often are the most motivated because they would not journey so far simply to retreat or surrender, as locals who were coerced to join the insurgents might do.

CONCLUSIONS: Europeans like Garsallaoui and the Turks and Chechens in the TIP have changed the outlook of Central Asian militant groups, which focus as much on the international jihadist movements as their own. Now Central Asians, experienced in combat and with an international outlook, appear to be ready to move to the next “hot” theater in West Africa, where they can provide operational combat expertise and leadership to a new crop of northern Malians who have been recruited into AQIM’s coalition in the country. While they may not have the ease of travel of Europeans, there are a number of fighters like Garsallaoui and Merah that hold European citizenship fighting in Central Asia now. They may play a key role in bringing the Afghan battlefield to Mali in the months and years to come.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Jacob Zenn is an international security analyst and legal adviser based in Washington D.C., who frequently contributes to The Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor, Eurasia Daily Monitor and Militant Leadership Monitor publications, the Asia Times, World Politics Review, and the Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel.