Tag Archives: Gao

An unholy alliance

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Economist

Tuareg rebels and al-Qaeda unite to create a fierce new state in the north

GUNFIRE pierced the night quiet. For weeks, inhabitants of the ancient desert towns of Gao and Timbuktu had feared that rival Tuareg rebels would clash. Between January and March they had together waged a devastatingly effective campaign against Mali’s army, sending its last troops packing in early April and proclaiming an independent state called Azawad. But the rivalry then flared, and lawlessness and factionalism have been rife since.

Machinegun bursts on May 26th sent residents scurrying for cover. But the shooting turned out to be celebratory. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, a secular group known by its French initials, MNLA, had cut a deal with Islamic fundamentalists from a locally dominant lot called Ansar Eddine. The pair agreed to join forces and set up a transitional government. Peace would follow.

Yet residents still have reason to be scared. Ansar Eddine has become almost indistinguishable from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). This is the closest to government that al-Qaeda, under any guise, has ever come. Though the nomadic Tuareg and other ethnic groups of northern Mali number only 1.3m people, the area they now control is as big as France. Continue reading →

Is Al-Qaeda Beefing Up Its Presence in Mali?

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

Ali Cissé, 30, a shopkeeper, couldn’t contain his curiosity when a new wave of gunmen rolled into town. Outside the governor’s compound in downtown Gao — a dusty administrative center of adobe architecture and open skies — he saw a fleet of armored vehicles with foreign fighters standing guard. “I saw [militants] from Niger, Pakistan, Algeria, Mauritania [and] Tunisia,” Cissé tells TIME by phone from northern Mali. “I identified them by their accents because they like approaching people… to try to win their [sympathy].” Whatever their provenance, the fighters had one thing in common: they rode with Ansar Eddine, a group at times almost indistinguishable from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the regional terror franchise.

Ever since a motley combination of Tuareg separatists and Islamic supremacists swept through northern Mali in a blaze of gunfire, an echo-chamber of rumor, gossip and misinformation has supplanted hard facts, and it’s worth treating all information — however credible the source — with caution. But it isn’t just Cissé claiming that foreign Islamic militants are flocking to this latest of troublespots. In the fabled waystation of Timbuktu, 300 miles upriver from Gao, a tour guide called Buba tells TIME that “Algerian nationals” are prevalent among the armed groups controlling the city. Taken with other reported sighting of foreign Islamist supremacists arriving in northern Mali, it’s one of a number of signs that will have al-Qaeda watchers wondering whether northern Mali is becoming a new jihadist playground — even as the U.S. and its allies move against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and a relentless drone campaign batters the badlands of Pakistan’s Northwest frontier.

If Cissé kept a diary, it would provide a troubling record of the power struggle between secular Tuareg separatists and a host of religiously-inspired militants seeking to impose Shar’ia across the region. The day after Cissé saw holy warriors in downtown Gao, the 30-year-old shopkeeper says he picked his way through a military base that until recently housed U.S. special forces training the Malian army — but has now been laid waste by the various armed groups that have seized northern Mali. The next day, protesters took to the streets of Gao chanting, “Down with Ansar Eddine and the MNLA” — the initials of the secular group vying with the Islamists for supremacy and blamed for the prevailing lawlessness. On Wednesday, May 16, Cissé says that “sporadic gunfire” continued as the Islamists and gunmen from the MNLA dispersed crowds by firing over them. Continue reading →

Mali’s Fog of War: Refugees Tell of Terror, Hunger and Rape

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

It took Ibrahim Touré three weeks to escape from Timbuktu after rebels seized the desert town, but, in his heart, he hasn’t really left. The 26-year-old shopkeeper studies the floor as he talks, cradling a welter of scabs and fresh scar tissue on his right elbow. Sometimes he stops to rub his head with an uncertain hand — the unforgiving sun, maybe, or a reaction to the horrors he has witnessed and suffered. If what he says is true, then the fog of war in northern Mali — where Tuareg separatists, Islamic militants, Arab militias and a hodgepodge of terrorist groups are vying for control following a spectacularly successful military campaign — is concealing a grisly spate of human-rights abuses, humanitarian suffering and war crimes.

The shadows were lengthening one Friday after mosque, he relates, when he saw three truckloads of gunmen from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) pounce on two young women. One was an old school friend called Isata, Touré says — a girl who was “always laughing.” The rebels fired wildly in the air and stuck a gun in her face. Hidden in a nomad’s tent, Touré felt his guts contort as he watched them rape her. “I didn’t think these kinds of things could happen in reality,” he says. After the gunmen left the two violated women on the ground, other women went to comfort them. Isata “couldn’t even talk,” says Touré. “Her whole face was destroyed where they’d hit her. There was blood everywhere.”

(MORE: One Foreign Couple’s Escape from Timbuktu)

Touré’s own problems were just beginning. As he surveyed the ruins of his electronics shop days later — looted, he reckons, by MNLA fighters — Islamic militants from a faction called Ansar Eddine took issue with his livelihood. Spotting a computer, they asked him what he wanted with a white man’s things. They knocked him to his knees, gripped his hands and held a flaming torch to his arm. Someone struck him on the leg with a knife. “I was so scared,” he says. “I can’t remember what happened after that.” Hungry, wounded and destitute, Touré has wound up on a dusty sidewalk in Mali’s capital, Bamako, one of hundreds of people arriving each day on overcrowded buses from the country’s disintegrating north. His nephews Oussman and Hamar (ages 12 and 5) lie in the dirt nearby. Their mother died about a month ago from “sickness and starvation.” Continue reading →

Clinging to power

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Economist

EVERY morning a bus caked in dust pulls into Bamako bringing the latest rumours of war. Looking dazed and dehydrated after 24 hours on the road, Mohammad Maiga explains how Tuareg separatists and Islamist militants have turned his native Gao, northern Mali’s most populous town, into a ghost town. “Everyone is leaving,” says Mr Maiga. “There’s no food, no supplies.” Blackouts last all day. Banks and offices have been pillaged by rampant rebels.

Mr Maiga says he saw a truck of National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) rebels abduct three young women on the street in front of his house the day before he fled. “They had no choice,” he explains. “The rebels had weapons.” His claim is impossible to verify but it is one of many alleged instances of murder, robbery and rape laid at the rebels’ door. The UN has called for international action to halt the worsening crisis. Aid agencies reckon that over 200,000 people have been displaced though no one knows the exact numbers.

The clearest winners so far from Mali’s chaos are a trio of jihadist groups—Ansar Eddine, a Salafist outfit that emerged from the secular MNLA’s slipstream; al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb; and another terror group called the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa. The black flag of militant Islam has been spotted over all northern Mali’s big towns and residents say public awareness campaigns about the dictates of sharialaw are underway. Yet far from berating the Islamists for imposing a strict and alien form of Islam, some inhabitants actually offer guarded praise. Ansar Eddine, in particular, they say, is attempting to rein in the MNLA’s rapacious fighters. Continue reading →

Escape from Timbuktu: Foreigners Flee as Mali’s Rebels Declare Independence

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

A handout picture released by Azawad National Liberation Movement (MLNA) on April 2, 2012 and taken in February 2012 reportedly shows MNLA fighters gathering in an undisclosed location in Mali. AFP / GETTY IMAGES

TIME.com

Caked in dust and bristling with weaponry, the Tuareg rebels smiled at Neil Whitehead and Diane English. “It’s okay, we’re here for your protection,” one of the veiled warriors grinned at the nervous couple. Caught up in the middle of a war after Tuareg separatists advanced hundreds of miles in a matter of hours, the hotel-owners had tried twice already to leave their adopted home of Timbuktu. At first, retreating army columns had blocked their way. Then, when the road eventually cleared, English and Whitehead ran straight into a firefight. “There were guns going off all around us and tracer going past the cab windows, and we thought, ‘This isn’t good’,” English says, with a flash of understatement.

Yet the real threat came not from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (known by its French acronym, MLNA)—the 1,000 or so secular Tuareg separatists who Friday declared independence—but Islamist militants and al-Qaeda emirs busy hijacking their campaign. As Timbuktu fell, French diplomats brokered a deal to spirit English, Whitehead, their “leggy, Saharan desert dog” Lily, and a French citizen also trapped in the fabled city to safety. Wearing turbans to disguise themselves and taking only those belongings they could carry, the fugitives piled into Tuareg pickups—and then camped and drove, camped and drove, “belting through the desert hell for leather,” English says.  The rebels “really were fantastic… From the time we put ourselves in their hands… although I knew we weren’t yet safe, I wasn’t really concerned.”

(READ: Gaddafi’s Gift to Mali: The Tuareg Seize Timbuktu.)

Two days and 850 miles of hard driving later, they arrived in Mauritania’s seaside capital of Nouakchott—dusty, tired, rattled—and relieved. “Having a shower and a change of clothes was an absolute luxury,” says English. Yet happy ending aside, the flight through the desert underscores one of the most unsettling aspects of Mali’s Tuareg revolt: how al-Qaeda’s regional franchise has been able to exploit the instability in northern Mali much more, and much faster, than almost anyone anticipated. The first worrying signs emerged Monday with reports that Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the Algerian-born leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had been spotted in Timbuktu, alongside two other prominent AQIM commanders, Abou Zeid and Yahya Abou al-Hammam. “It’s extremely difficult to evaluate the claims and reports coming out of Timbuktu,” says to Andrew Lebovich, an analyst with the Navanti Group who focuses on Sahelian issues. But “multiple sources cite eyewitnesses who say they saw one or several AQIM leaders.” As civilians fleeing Timbuktu impart fresh accounts of what is happening in the desert city, the number of claims is growing steadily. Continue reading →

Fall of Timbuktu to rebels prompts fears for historic treasures

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Times

Rebels in Mali completed their capture of the biggest population centres in the north of the country yesterday by taking the historic trading town of Timbuktu.

Its capitulation, eight days after a coup by junior officers in the capital, Bamako, which overthrew the democratically elected Government, marks the latest gain in a three-day advance by the Tuareg rebels. The junta said that it was seeking to negotiate a peace deal with the rebels and sent representatives to discuss a ceasefire.

The Tuareg forces, thought to be about 1,000, have exploited the uncertainty caused by the overthrow of the Government of President Amadou Toumani Touré, which has left the army with no clear chain of command. Continue reading →

The Fearsome Tuareg Uprising in Mali: Less Monolithic than Meets the Eye

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

 

Tuareg rebels stand near a truck in Mali on March 19, 2012. DPA / LANDOV

TIME.com

The allegedly al-Qaeda-linked faction of the Tuareg rebellion in troubled Mali seems more of an opportunistic break than a real extension of the terror group

Somewhere close to the Algerian border a delegation of Tuareg notables hurried through the desert for a summit. It was mid-March and there was dissension among them. One of their own, a renegade desert warrior called Iyad ag Ghali, had just thrown the Tuaregs’ meticulously plotted rebellion against the Malian government into jeopardy. In proclamations appearing on YouTube, ag Ghali’s spokesman had done everything that the committee behind the two-month-old uprising by Tuareg rebels wanted to avoid. “It is our obligation to fight for the application of Shar’ia in Mali,” the spokesman said. The poisonous phrase, seized eagerly by a Malian government smarting from military defeat, undid months of careful political messaging. Now everyone would think the Tuareg were in bed with al-Qaeda.

How the meeting between the Tuareg notables and the soft-spoken but inscrutable ag Ghali played out is known only to a handful of people. But within hours the rebel Mouvement National pour la Liberacion de l’Azawad (MNLA) broke publicly with ag Ghali, branding him a “criminal” whose efforts “to establish a theocratic regime” were anathema “to the foundations of our culture and civilization.” As the mud flew, ag Ghali struck back, retorting that his Ansar Eddine group (the name means “defenders of the faith”) was the new power in northern Mali. The war of words continued on March 30 as both groups claimed to have taken the strategically important town Kidal, a regional capital of 40,000 people, after days of fighting. “The rebels have been in the town since 11 o’clock. They almost have complete control,” one inhabitant told TIME by phone. “They are all armed in pickup vehicles,” another resident said. “Women uttered cries of joy to greet them at the airport.” With disarray in Bamako, following last week’s military coup, the Tuareg — secular or not — have taken their biggest prize to date and are already attacking the even larger town of Gao, 200 miles to the south.

MORE: Un-Welcoming the Presidents: The Mali Junta Digs In

The vitriolic falling out between ag Ghali and the MNLA goes some way to illustrating the complicated tapestry of interests and tensions within the Tuareg rebellion, a topic that swam into focus first after weaponry from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s looted arsenals flooded into the Sahara last year. With thousands of expatriate Tuaregs who worked for Gaddafi’s military forced to flee Libya amid the revolutionary chaos, much of the hardware is thought to have made its way to northern Mali. Desolate and unpoliceable, this swathe of desert and rocky scrub is also home to the regional terror franchise, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. That combination set alarm bells ringing. What, exactly, was the relationship between Tuareg fighters, with access to large quantities of heavy weaponry, and AQIM? Continue reading →