International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda warned the Malian government over reports of human rights abuses by Malian forces in the drive to re-take the north.
Jihadist forces upon fleeing Timbuktu for the desert torched the Ahmed Baba Institute—a library housing a priceless collection of centuries-old Islamic manuscripts.
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.
Malian security forces have killed civilians, targeting ethnic groups associated with rebels in the north, particularly Tuaregs and Arabs, Human Rights Watch charges.
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.
Islamist militants in Timbuktu destroyed more Sufi shrines days after the UN Security Council approved an intervention force to retake Mali’s breakaway north.
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.”
