Mauritania has just announced the arrest by force on its territory of three Polisario Front activists acting within the al-Qaeda Organization in the Maghreb (AQMI), and the search is carried on to try to overpower what is remaining of the terrorist network.
This news confirms the different reports and conclusions drawn by many international experts and observers about the increasing danger of such collusion between the Polisario and the AQMI susceptible to increase tensions and conflict risks.
It is to be reminded that this is not the first time that activities, fighters and sometimes sympathizers of the Polisario are involved in Jihadi cells of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb or even participate in war or terrorist operations of the Salafi and Jihadi organization.

What is left from the Polisario Front ? Few things are left to say if we examine closely the declining status of the independantist-armed group, the armed wing of the Algerian generals! The founders of the North African revolutionary movement are dead or have returned to Morocco or Mauritania, the others fighting with the pro-Algerian clan of Mohammed Abdelaziz have been imprisoned, are exiled or have escaped. Fighters, who were thousands during the 70s and 80s in an open war against Morocco and Mauritania, with the direct military support of Algeria, have left for their respective countries or to Spain. There remains, in arms, only some hundreds of indoctrinated men, most of them born in Tindouf camps, Algeria, and who hardly share with their eldest, the independence dream.
The melancholic Polisario fighters, being in forced rest, remain tempted by the Islamist fundamentalism, enduring and prolific in the region, mainly in Algeria with the dissolved Islamist Salvation Front (ISF), the rival factions of the ISF split and the Salafi Jihadi movement with the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), active in many regions of Algeria and in the Sahara. Thus, its obedience to Al-Qaeda makes it a fearsome opponent. Contacts and common war, in the African Sahel, between the Polisario and the GSPC are frequent. The collision of the two warrior groups is evident and the risk to see the Polisario changing radically or one of its parties, within the Islamist radical influence, is a major datum, seriously taken by the political and military experts and strategists.

It is no doubt for international strategists and experts, as it is the case for the chanceries of the important powers present in the Maghreb and in West Africa, that the zone of the African Sahel, a desert and arid region covering about five million square km, from the Atlantic to the Red sea, has become, along the years, a large land susceptible to all non-controlled dangers where are present all kinds of mafias, well known crimes, fundamentalist proselytism  and trade infecting all the regions, starting from Mauritania till the Sudan, crossing Mali, Niger, Chad and South of Algeria.
This desert no man’s land, unstable and out of all control, sheltering unlawful trade, illegal immigration, networks for smugglers, market for different weapons and encouraging, if necessary, all the mafia stream of the Sahel, as well as the internal rebellion of Tuaregs  from Mali, Niger and Chad, the salafist and jihadist fighters from the Salafist Group for Preaching and Fighting (GSPC) and the Al Qaïda of the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI), as well as the small groups of  fundamentalists moving in their orbit.