Reuters reported today  that the Islamist Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) from Algeria has announce it has joined al-Queda and proclaimed allegiance to Osama bin Laden after nearly a year of negotiations between the two groups. Abd al-Malek Droudkel, leader of the GSPC, also urged other Islamist groups around the world to join forces to defeat the US. 

Their targets seem to be the US and France.  al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawarhiri urged the GSPC to punish the "Crusader nation" France.  According the GSPC, "The United States can be overcome only by the Islamic United States….We advise our brothers in other jihadist movements to join this unity." 

"We’re not talking about large numbers of terrorists, like Iraq or Afghanistan, or fixed training bases," one U.S. counterterrorism official in Washington told Reuters.

"We’re talking about relatively small numbers of moving targets who are difficult to fix and destroy but who represent an increasing threat … It’s not the biggest threat in the world, but it’s a significant emerging one."

These terrorists have a few common threads:  they are all out of poor countries and they all hate the US for their policy in Iraq.