Armed assailants seized the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, Mali, Nov. 20, taking some 170 hostages and sparking a confrontation with security troops and US and French special forces in which at least 27 people are dead. A group calling itself al-Mourabitoun claimed responsibility jointly with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Al-Mourabitoun is said to be the new outfit of Algerian Islamist leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar [12]—who was twice reported killed, once in a Chadian military operation in Mali [13] in 2013 and then earlir this year in a US air-strike in Libya [12]. In a statement posted on Twitter on June 19, just after the Libyan air-strike, the group said he was "still alive and well and he wanders and roams in the land of Allah, supporting his allies and vexing his enemies." (SMH [14], CNN [15], DNA [16])
There are several presumably unrelated factions that go by the name of al-Mourabitoun or Mourabitun around the world. One is the youth wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel, a civil organization led by Sheikh Raed Salah [17], "the sheikh of al-Aqsa." (Jerusalem Post [18], Oct. 11) Another is the Murabitun Worldwide Movement [19], a Morocco-based sect led by Abd al-Qadir al-Sufi—said to be a former British anarchist who wrote under the name Ian Dallas in the 1960s. The Murabitun Worldwide Movement has over the past 15 years established a following among the Maya indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico. (World War 4 Report [20], June 2004)
All these groups take their name [21] from the Moorish dynasty that controlled Spain in the 11th and 12th centuries (also known as the Almoravids). Tellingly, this original Murabitun was a harsh and proto-fundamentalist military order that took over Spain following the decline of the more tolerant and universalist Caliphate of Córdoba. It's an irony that Islamophobes have seized upon [22] the period of Murabitun rule to try to tar the entire eight-century era of Islamic dominion in Spain—and now jihadists are similarly seizing on this period as apprently representative of their ideal. Another one to file under "paradoxical unity of opposites [23]."