Helicopter Crash in Mali Kills 13 French Troops

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/world/europe/crash-mali.html

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PARIS — A midair collision of two helicopters killed 13 French soldiers on Monday night in Mali, French officials announced Tuesday morning, the deadliest single incident for the French Army in nearly four decades.

The soldiers were part of the 4,500-strong French force that has been in place in the Sahel region of West Africa since 2013 to combat the violent jihadism that has spread across the region, plaguing several countries.

The two French Army helicopters were supporting a ground operation of French commandos that was battling a group of jihadists traveling across the desert scrub in pickup trucks and on motorcycles, military officials said.

One of the helicopters had been deployed to “allow for the immediate exfiltration of elements on the ground,” an army news release stated.

Flying at low altitude, the two helicopters crashed into each other.

“It was very dark,” the French defense minister, Florence Parly, said at an afternoon news conference. “It was moonless.” The soldiers on the ground had already engaged the jihadists, Ms. Parly said, and they had asked for air support.

She said the “combat and operational conditions are extremely demanding.”

There were no survivors among the French soldiers, officials said. Those killed were commandos and “elite soldiers” of the ground army, Ms. Parly said. The crash occurred in what is currently the most sensitive and Islamist-plagued zone, Mali’s southeast, near the lawless border with Niger. The authority of the government in these border zones, far from the capital, is minimal.

“These 13 heroes had just one goal: to protect us,” President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

French forces in the region are seen as essential support to weak local armies that have been struggling to contain the threat from Islamic State-affiliated extremists.

Attacks are frequent and the armies in Mali and in Burkina Faso appear powerless either to head them off or to limit their own losses. Just a week ago, 24 Malian soldiers were killed in the same region when their patrol was attacked. The Malians said 17 jihadists had also been killed.

At the beginning of November, jihadists associated with the Islamic State attacked the Malian military base of Indelimane, killing about 50 soldiers. Monday evening’s crash occurred about 17 miles south of Indelimane. French losses have been lighter — 38 killed since the French military first intervened to head off a jihadist advance in Mali almost seven years ago.

But the continuing attacks, the acknowledged failure so far of French forces to bring the Sahel armies up to speed, and the impunity with which the jihadist bands operate have raised questions in France about the usefulness of Operation Barkhane, as the French deployment is called. On Tuesday, far-left representatives in the French Parliament called on the government to think about pulling out.

But French military officials, in a recent briefing for journalists in Paris, gave no hint of any near-term pullout — on the contrary, they indicated that the French forces would be in the region indefinitely. Those officials confirmed the July statement of General François Lecointre, chief of the general staff, who told French television that without his country’s forces, the Sahel governments “would collapse on themselves.”

The military officials said that jihadists in the region were not strong enough to mount attacks on national capitals and did not control any territory but that they had been effective in persistently sapping the resources and authority of the national governments.

“They want to show that the states are weak,” said an officer at the briefing.