Amid music and celebration in northern Mali since a French-led advance swept the jihadists from power, come growing reports of Tuareg and Arab residents forced to flee in reprisals.
In a mission slated to last two weeks, US Air Force C-17 transport planes are ferrying troops and material from France to Mali for the offensive against jihadist rebels.
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.
Kurdish activists charge that “dark forces” bent on sabotaging Turkey’s peace talks with the PKK were behind the armed attack that left three leaders dead in Paris.
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.
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.
A “European Day of Action and Solidarity against Austerity” marked the first time strike action was held simultaneously across four countries: Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal.
A right-wing "Identity Group" seized a mosque in Poitiers, issuing a "declaration of war" against the "Islamization" of France—weeks after a bomb attack on a kosher shop in Paris.
The new Socialist president of France, François Hollande, is emulating his reactionary predecessor Sarkozy in his response to a new uprising by immigrant youth.
French prosecutors issued international arrest warrants for three prominent Syrian officials charged with collusion in crimes against humanity, in what human rights lawyers are calling a major victory in the pursuit of those believed responsible for mass torture, abuse and summary executions in the regime's detention facilities. The warrants name three leading security officials—including Ali Mamlouk, a former intelligence chief and senior adviser to President Bashar al-Assad, as well as head of the Air Force Intelligence security branch, Jamil Hassan. A third, Abdel Salam Mahmoud—an Air Force Intelligence officer who reportedly runs a detention facility at al-Mezzeh military base near Damascus—was also named. Hassan and Mamlouk are the most senior Syrian officials to receive an international arrest warrant throughout the course of the conflict. (Photo of hunger strikers at Syrian prison via Foreign Policy. Credit: Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images)
Just over a year after Trump's air-strikes on an Assad regime airbase in response to a chemical attack, we witness a repeat of this episode—although this time the air-strikes were on wider targets, and carried out in conjunction with British and French forces. In response to last week's chemical attack on Douma in Syria's besieged Eastern Ghouta enclave, missiles and warplanes from the USS Donald Cook in the eastern Mediterranean carried out the first Western strikes on targets around the Damascus area. The targets were chemical warfare and military facilities, with no deaths or civilian casualties yet reported. "Anti-war" hypocrites who were silent during Trump's massive bombardment of civilians in Raqqa and Mosul, silent during the Assad-Purtin destruction of Aleppo, and silent (at best) over the Douma chemical attack, are now protesting air-strikes on Assad's machinery of death. Such "anti-war" depravity is part of the problem. (Image: Syria Solidarity NYC)
