Hundreds fled lawless northern Mali overnight and the country’s neighbours weighed a military intervention on Thursday amid fears Al Qaeda-linked Islamists are turning the country into a rogue state.
Alarmed by the rapid collapse of the west African nation which has split into a rebel controlled north and junta-controlled south in two weeks since a coup, the world grappled for a response and a place to lay the blame. West African military chiefs met in Abidjan to discuss the possible deployment of a 2,000-strong military force as a chunk of Mali the size of France fell into the hands of Tuareg separatists and Islamists. Observers said the west was obliged to intervene after their role in Libya forced hundreds of well-armed Tuareg fighters to flee home to Mali, overwhelming its army and giving other outlaws a means to serve their own interests.
“It must be said and said again that the factor that unleashed all of this is the Western intervention in Libya,” said Eric Denece, director of the French Centre for Intelligence Research (CF2R), a think tank. He said Mali’s foreign minister, Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga, had repeatedly warned Paris. But France is hoping Mali’s neighbours will step in to find a political solution to both restore democracy and end the Islamist juggernaut which puts the whole of the fragile Sahel at risk.
“There won’t be a military solution for the Tuaregs. It’s a political solution that we need,” Foreign Minister Alain Juppe warned. As the Tuareg trumpeted the success of a decades-old struggle to “liberate” their homeland, their fundamentalist comrades-turned-rivals began imposing sharia in northern Mali. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) said as a result of their successful conquest of an area they call the Azawad, they are halting all military operations from midnight Thursday.
But the desert nomads are not alone in the north and many say it is Iyad Ag Ghaly’s Ansar Dine — which has begun imposing sharia law — who are the new masters of the desert. “In reality, from what we know, the MNLA is in charge of nothing at the moment … it is Iyad who is the strongest and he is with AQIM,” a Malian military source told AFP, referring to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). But on their website, the group said it was “holding its position in the face of all these mafia networks and distances itself from Ansar Dine and others who rise up on the path to the liberation of Azawad”. Three of AQIM’s top leaders, all of them Algerians, were spotted in the fabled city of Timbuktu in talks with Ag Ghaly earlier this week.
Ansar Dine, “Defenders of Faith” in Arabic, has ordered women to wear headscarves and threatened to cut off the hands of thieves in the ancient city, once the jewel in Mali’s burgeoning tourism industry. Three westerners were evacuated from Timbuktu in extreme circumstances after it fell on Sunday, sources close to the rescue said Thursday. “Three westerners, including a Frenchman, were evacuated in the past days to a country neighbouring Mali. It went well but it was very difficult,” said a Malian who took part in the evacuation, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In Gao, another northern capital, hundreds fled to neighbouring countries, residents said, as the various rebel groups set to looting. Coup leader Captain Amadou Sanogo accused them of kidnapping and raping women and girls. On Thursday, witnesses reported Islamists had seized the Algerian embassy and arrested diplomats. “I am currently in front of the Algerian consulate in district four in Gao. Armed Islamists have entered the consulate, arrested the diplomats and staff and taken down the Algerian flag to put up their own,” one witness told AFP in Bamako by telephone. Algeria confirmed its consulate had come under attack.
