WASHINGTON — The State Department warned Wednesday that a new terrorist group linked to an Algerian militant has emerged as "the greatest near-term threat to U.S. and Western interests" in the Sahel region of Africa. The State Department's move underscored the resilience of the militant factions and their ability to forge new terrorist alliances, even in the face of Western pressure.
"We are seeing a dangerous mutation of the threat," said Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism at Georgetown University. "Splinters can become even more consequential than their parent organization."
The source of much of the concern is Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian militant who has long been a notorious figure in the Sahel region — a vast area on the southern flank of the Sahara that stretches from Senegal to Chad — and who appears to have become more dangerous even as his ties to Al Qaeda seem to have become more tenuous. Known as Laaouar, or the one-eyed, after losing an eye to shrapnel, Mr. Belmokhtar fought against a Soviet-installed government in Afghanistan.
After returning to Algeria in the 1990s, he joined a militant Algerian group and took refuge in Mali, where he was involved in smuggling and kidnapping for ransom, including the abduction of a Canadian diplomat in 2008.
Mr. Belmokhtar became a leading figure in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or A.Q.I.M., the Qaeda affiliate in North Africa.
But in 2012, he split with the group to lead the Al Mulathameen Battalion, which was officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department on Wednesday.
"The finding reflects the fact that the terrorist groups in the region are in flux, although certain individuals remain constant," said Michael R. Shurkin, a former C.I.A. analyst who is now at the RAND Corporation.
Since breaking with the Qaeda affiliate, Mr. Belmokhtar has shown a penchant for carrying out headline-grabbing attacks against Western interests.
"He is a more adventurous, perhaps even more reckless operator than the A.Q.I.M. leadership has shown itself to be," said Daniel Benjamin, the former senior counterterrorism official at the State Department who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College. "And that translates into a threat."
In January, Mr. Belmokhtar led the attack on a gas plant in Algeria that resulted in the death of 38 civilians, including three Americans. Four months later, his group joined with a Western African terrorist faction — the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa — to carry out attacks in Niger that killed at least 20 people, the State Department said.
In August, Mr. Belmokhtar's faction and the West African extremists announced that they were joining to establish yet another group: Al Murabitoun.
The new terrorist group, a State Department official said, "concerns us more than any in the region."
Even before joining with Mr. Belmokhtar's organization, the West African group was a concern in its own right: It participated in the push toward Bamako, Mali's capital, which led to the French intervention in January.
Designating Mr. Belmokhtar's faction as a foreign terrorist group allows the United States to take legal action against it, such as arresting individuals in the United States who provide "material support" and seizing assets in American-based banks. It does not authorize military action, but it is a useful form of diplomatic pressure on other nations to take steps to crack down on the group and its supporters.
The Obama administration has not always seemed to be of one mind on how aggressively to pursue Mr. Belmokhtar, especially when it comes to considering military action or providing intelligence to Algeria or other nations that would enable them to take such action.
Mr. Belmokhtar's precise whereabouts is not known, though he and his group are believed to operate in Libya, southern Algeria and northern Mali.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from New York.
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