This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
With Timbuktu Retaken, France May Pull Back in Mali
With Timbuktu Retaken, France May Pull Back in Mali
(about 4 hours later)
SEGOU, Mali — French paratroopers arrived in the ancient desert oasis of Timbuktu on Monday, securing its airport and main roads as thousands of residents poured out of its narrow, mud-walled streets to greet French and Malian troops, waving the two countries’ flags, with whoops, cheers and shouts.
BAMAKO, Mali — As French and Malian troops routed Islamist militants from the northern Malian towns of Gao and Timbuktu, residents’ relief and elation appeared to give way on Tuesday to some measure of reprisal and frustration.
“Timbuktu has fallen,” said the city’s mayor, Halle Ousmane Cissé, in a telephone interview from the capital, Bamako, where he has been in exile since the Islamist militants took over the city 10 months ago. He said he planned to return to his city on Tuesday.
In Gao, groups of residents were reported hunting down suspected fighters who had not fled ahead of the French-Malian military forces who took control of the town over the weekend. Other residents expressed concern that Gao remained unsafe and was acutely short of food and fuel after a prolonged isolation.
The rapid advance to Timbuktu, a day after French and African troops took firm control of the former rebel stronghold of Gao, may spell the beginning of the end of France’s major involvement in the conflict here.
“The city is free, but I think the areas close by are still dangerous,” said Mahamane Touré, a Gao resident reached by telephone from Bamako, the capital. “These guys are out there.”
The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, was a little more cautious than the mayor in his assessment of the situation in Timbuktu on Monday evening, saying on television station TF1: “French and Malian forces are liberating the city. It’s not completely finished, but it’s well on its way.”
Mr. Touré, who spent the evening watching soccer on television and listening to music with friends, said that although everyone was enjoying the new freedoms, the legacy of Islamist occupation was evident in the hardship of everyday life.
The French president, François Hollande, suggested on Monday that French troops might soon stop their northward advance, leaving it to African soldiers to pursue the militants into their redoubts in the desert north. “We are winning this battle,” Mr. Hollande said in televised remarks. “When I say, ‘We,’ this is the Malian army, this is the Africans, supported by the French.”
“The price of gasoline is almost double, and the price of food is very high,” Mr. Touré said. “There are still things in the market, but no one has any money and there is no aid.”
He continued, “Now, the Africans can take over.”
Reporters and photographers in Timbuktu, the storied desert oasis farther north that the French-Malian forces secured on Monday, saw looters pillaging shops and other businesses, with some saying the merchants were mainly Arabs, Mauritanians and Algerians who had supported the Islamist radicals who summarily executed, stoned and mutilated people they suspected of being nonbelievers during their 10-month occupation.
In a new move to support the French military effort, Britain said on Tuesday that it would send another 240 military personnel to Mali and elsewhere in West Africa, in addition to the 90 already deployed there, to bolster the training of Malian and other African troops involved in the campaign against the Islamist militants.
Alex Crawford, a television correspondent for Britain’s Sky News, said, “This is months and months of frustration and repression finally erupting.”
Officials said about 40 would be based in Mali, and another 200 elsewhere in west Africa, possibly in Ghana or Nigeria. They said precise numbers and other details of the deployment in Mali would depend on a meeting in Brussels later on Tuesday to develop plans for a European Union-led training mission inside Mali.
The rapidly shifting developments came less than three weeks into the military effort by France, the former colonial power in Mali, to reverse the spread of Islamist extremism in the northern half of the desert country, which had threatened to engulf the south, topple the weak central government and destabilize a vast area of northern Africa.
The officials said the additional troops would be deployed rapidly, joining 20 British air force personnel already supporting the deployment of a C-17 Globemaster military transport ferrying French troops and equipment to Bamako, the Malian capital, and another 70 needed to operate a British Sentinel surveillance aircraft that Britain dedicated to the French mission last week.
French troops, helicopters and warplanes began arriving here at the Malian government’s invitation on Jan. 11. Since then other West African countries have started to send troops. Britain is preparing to send more than 300 military training personnel, and the United States is providing aerial cargo and refueling help.
The announcement of the new troop commitment by 10 Downing Street raised immediate concerns in Parliament, where lawmakers voiced fears that Britain could be dragged deeper into the conflict and find itself unable to avoid a combat role, as Prime Minister David Cameron has promised.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said that as of Tuesday 17 sorties by United States Air Force C-17 cargo jets had flown 500 French troops and 390 tons of equipment into Bamako. In addition, there has been one aerial refueling operation by an American KC-135 tanker aircraft, which provided 33,000 pounds of fuel to several French warplanes, the officials said.
Defense Secretary Philip Hammond sought to soothe the disquiet by saying that the government in London remained committed to avoiding any combat role for British troops. France, he said, had “made it clear that it envisages a short-term intervention” to stabilize Mali. “It is not our intention to deploy combat troops,” he said. “We are very aware of the dangers of mission creep.”
At the same time, a meeting of international donors was getting under way on Tuesday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as part of an effort to provide more than $450 million in long-term financing for the military intervention in Mali.
In Paris on Monday, President Hollande said that the difficult task of flushing militants from the vast empty stretches of Mali’s arid northern countryside was the job of African troops. “They’re the ones who will go into the area of the north, which we know is the most difficult because the terrorists are hidden there and can still lead operations that are extremely dangerous for neighboring countries and for Mali,” he said.
The French-led effort has met surprisingly little resistance from the array of Islamist militias that occupied the northern part of Mali, an area about twice the size of Germany, in the spring of 2012 in the midst of a national political crisis.
Finding these fighters, who have long been accustomed to hiding out in remote areas, has been tough for French troops, who have sophisticated tracking equipment and surveillance drones, said Col. Thierry Burkhard, a French military spokesman, noting that the fighters often travel in civilian vehicles.
It remains unclear how long the foreign military occupation will last. Most of the Islamist fighters have melted into the desert and could be regrouping to fight again.
African troops have been trickling into Mali over the last few days from neighboring states, part of what is expected to be a 5,000-member force intended to restore the northern half of the country to government control.
In a bid to consolidate the gains, troops from Mali and neighboring Niger arrived Tuesday in the small town of Ansongo, about 50 miles south of Gao, one day after President François Hollande of France urged African countries to take a more prominent role in the operations.
A European Union mission to train several thousand Malian soldiers has yet to begin, however, and any extensive combat operations led by African troops are not expected until August or September, after the brief rainy season.
Just as in Gao two days before, residents filled the streets there to greet the arrival of the African troops as they toured Ansongo and its environs.
Television footage from Timbuktu captured scenes of jubilation as thousands of people drove cars, trucks and motorbikes through the streets, honking their horns.
“Everyone is very, very, very happy,” said Ibrahim Haidara, an Ansongo resident reached by phone. “They chanted, ‘Vive la France!’ and ‘Long live African armies!’ ”
But there were concerns about the fate of Timbuktu’s trove of historical treasures. Mr. Cissé said someone had burned books at one of the most important libraries in a city famous for its thousands of well-preserved handwritten manuscripts dating as far back as the 13th century.
But like his counterparts in Gao, he worried that the fighters might not have gone very far.
The city’s libraries, along with its mud architecture and the tombs of hundreds of Sufi saints, have made it one of the most important historical sites in Africa. Islamists were said to have smashed many of the city’s tombs, saying that the ancient practice of venerating saints was un-Islamic.
“They are in the bush. They are hiding,” he said. “One must be careful.”
Mr. Cissé said he was told about the fire, which took place three days ago, by a city employee who left Timbuktu on Sunday and was able to call him. The phone lines to the city have been down for more than a week.
Peter
Tinti reported from Bamako, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Scott Sayare from Paris, John F. Burns from London and Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington.
Other scars of the Islamist occupation were readily visible.
“Timbuktu was built on Islam and Islamic law will prevail here,” read a slogan scrawled on city walls, according to Agence France-Presse.
French airstrikes had preceded the ground operation and French troops met no resistance, said Colonel Burkhard. The militants who had been controlling the city appeared to have fled northward.
French and Malian forces have begun to take control of the city, he said, but there are concerns that fighters remain hidden among the civilian population.
“I will indeed refrain from saying, today, that there’s no one left in Timbuktu,” Colonel Burkhard said.
To the east, the city of Gao is now under the full control of French and African troops, he said, with a contingent of 450 Malian soldiers joined by 40 soldiers from Niger and 40 from Chad. French special forces killed about 15 fighters in what were described as brief but intense firefights when they arrived just south of the city late Friday night, and perhaps 10 more militants on Sunday night on the city’s outskirts.
French aircraft were not responsible for aerial strikes reported in recent days in the northern city of Kidal, Colonel Burkhard said. In a statement, the secular Tuareg nationalist rebel group that started the conflict in January 2012, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, claimed that it was in control of Kidal. The group was quickly overtaken in its fight to control northern Mali by Islamist groups linked to Al Qaeda.
At least one American refueling aircraft was involved in a mission with French forces on Sunday night, Colonel Burkhard said.
France has two objectives in Mali, Mr. Le Drian said — to halt a militant advance toward the south and to seize control of population centers in the north — and both have been achieved. “The mission has been fulfilled,” he said.
French officials speak regularly of an additional objective: restoring Mali’s “territorial integrity,” but no one has concluded that the goal has been reached.
Lydia Polgreen reported from Segou, Mali, and Scott Sayare from Paris. John F. Burns contributed reporting from London, Steven Erlanger from Paris, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington..
