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.
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.
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.
As West African powers mull whether to invade Mali’s Islamist-held north or work out a power-sharing deal, young Malians are forming ad hoc militias to “liberate the north.”
Hundreds of nomadic Fulani pastoralists in central Mali are trapped between floodplains to the south and armed Islamist rebels to the north, and fear their way of life faces extinction.
Amnesty International warned after a visit to Mali July 31 that the country is slipping into “human rights chaos,” with abuses documented in the government-controlled south as well as the rebel-held north. Amnesty documented at least one incident in the… Read moreMali sliding into ‘human rights chaos’
