Algerian military forces attacked the Amenas gas complex in the interior Sahara, where a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took dozens of hostages.
With French troops fighting on the ground in Mali, jihadist militias advance on the capital, while Tuareg rebels pledge to re-establish a separatist state in the north.
France carried out air-strikes against Islamist rebels in Mali, helping government forces halt a drive southward by the militants who control the country’s desert north.
Rebels who have taken up arms again in the Central African Republic’s south, accusing the regime of not honoring peace accords, have seized several towns in the south.
Islamist militants in Timbuktu destroyed more Sufi shrines days after the UN Security Council approved an intervention force to retake Mali’s breakaway north.
The Libyan government closed the country’s southern borders and declared the southern provinces a military zone in response to growing lawlessness.
As Mali’s prime minister is removed by the junta, Ansar Dine rebels are embraced in peace talks—while the MUJAO rebels are sanctioned by the UN as an al-Qaeda front.
Security forces mixed it up with protesters both in Sudan, hit by a wave of student unrest, and in South Sudan’s West Bahr el-Ghazal state, where 10 were killed by army troops.
Mali’s government is in talks with Islamist rebels who control the country’s north, while Gen. Carter Ham in Washington warned that al-Qaeda has established a haven in the country.
Military experts from Africa, the United Nations and Europe have drafted plans to retake control of northern Mali, as West African nations prepare a request for armed intervention.
"Leftists" in the West are waxing paranoid about how the Syrian revolutionaries are a bunch of jihadists. But if the West intervenes in Mali, they will likely be rooting for jihadists—again.
Three armed Islamists, including a senior member of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), were apprehended in Algeria, in what authorities call a "fatal blow" to the network.
