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Pressing Mali Effort, French Forces Enter Rebel Stronghold
Pressing Mali Effort, French Forces Enter Rebel Stronghold
(about 9 hours later)
BAMAKO, Mali — French troops took control overnight of the airport of the last major northern Mali town still in rebel hands, officials said on Wednesday, after Islamist militants abandoned two other principal settlements in the vast, desert region where residents’ relief and elation has given way to some measure of reprisal and frustration.
TIMBUKTU, Mali — The streets were largely empty here late Wednesday except for the husks of burned-out vehicles and a small group of jumpy Malian soldiers manning a military checkpoint, one of whom accidentally fired his weapon into the ground as he checked documents.
A French military spokesman in Paris, Col. Thierry Burkhard, said French troops reached the airport of Kidal, in the remote northeast of Mali, in an operation that is continuing.
The Islamist militants who had held this fabled city for nearly a year were chased away by the continuing French military offensive, but they left behind signs, in English and French, declaring Timbuktu an Islamic enclave that enforced Shariah law.
Haminy Maiga, a local official, told news agencies that French forces met no resistance when they arrived aboard four airplanes that landed late on Tuesday without encountering resistance. France also sent helicopters, he said.
To the northeast, in Kidal, the last major stronghold held by the militants, French troops seized control of the airport, but a sandstorm prevented them from moving farther into the city, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian of France told members of Parliament in Paris on Wednesday.
Kidal is the capital of a desert region of the same name. Secular Tuareg rebels claim to be in control of the town after Islamists fled. A newly formed Islamist splinter group that broke with the main Ansar Dine Islamist force also claims to have a power base there.
Additional troops were later airlifted in, and African support troops also arrived from the south, Col. Thierry Burkhard, a French military spokesman, said. As was the case in the seizure of Timbuktu, French soldiers met no resistance in Kidal, Colonel Burkhard said. The militants who had occupied the city pulled back into the mountainous regions of Mali’s far north, near the Algerian border, Mr. Le Drian said at a news conference.
The new group calls itself the Islamic Movement for the Azawad and is led by Alghabass Ag Intalla, a leader of the Tuareg ethnic group from the Kidal region who has said he wants to negotiate a settlement with the central government in Bamako, 800 miles to the southwest. Azawad is a Tuareg term for northern Mali.
Tuareg fighters from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, or M.N.L.A., a secular militant group calling for independence for northern Mali, claimed Tuesday that they were in control of Kidal. The Tuaregs of the M.N.L.A. joined with Islamist fighters to seize the north last year, but have since broken with them and have indicated a willingness to fight against them alongside the French.
Mali has been in turmoil since early 2012, when junior officers in the south staged a coup to protest the government’s tepid response to an uprising in the north by Tuareg separatists who were subsequently pushed to the side by Islamic extremists bent on imposing an extreme form of Shariah law.
They remain opposed, however, to the presence in northern Mali of Malian forces, commanded from Bamako. The arrival of French forces in Kidal — along with reports of pillaging and attacks against Arab residents of Gao and Timbuktu after the French had freed the cities from rebel control — raised the specter of an explosion of ethnic tensions in the country.
Earlier this month, the Islamists suddenly advanced toward the capital, threatening to engulf the south, topple the weak central government and destabilize a vast area of northern Africa.
Given those concerns, Malian soldiers will not be tasked with taking control of Kidal, at least not to begin with, French officials said. Chadian soldiers are on their way to the city from Niamey, the capital of neighboring Niger, Colonel Burkhard said. France has insisted that African forces will take control of military operations in Mali once the major population centers of the north have been taken back, as is now the case.
After a series of punishing French airstrikes in recent days, French and Malian troops launched a lightning campaign on the ground, entering the northern towns of Gao and Timbuktu as Islamist rebels seemed to melt away to far-flung hide-outs, possibly in the Kidal Province.
France called upon the Malian authorities in Bamako to open “discussions” with groups in the country’s north, including “nonterrorist armed groups that recognize the integrity of Mali,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Philippe Lalliot, said Wednesday. Colonel Burkhard, the military spokesman, called upon Tuareg separatists to set aside their demands for independence.
In Gao, groups of residents were reported on Tuesday to be hunting down people suspected of being 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.
“Now the Tuaregs need to find a solution other than the holdup they want to do,” he said.
“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.”
Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, flew to Algiers on Thursday for talks with Algerian leaders that endorsed what he described as a new “security partnership” between the two governments in the wake of the hostage-taking and bloodshed at the gas field at In Amenas by militants protesting the French intervention in Mali.
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.
Officials said the trip reflected the new priority Mr. Cameron had given to forging ties across North Africa — and with other Western governments — in a bid to counter the threat of Qaeda-linked groups between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans.
“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.”
Lydia
Polgreen reported from Timbuktu, and Scott Sayare from Paris. John F. Burns and Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.
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.
Alex Crawford, a television correspondent for Britain’s Sky News, said, “This is months and months of frustration and repression finally erupting.”
The rapidly shifting developments came less than three weeks into the military effort led by France, the former colonial power whose 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 trainers.
Since the hostage crisis in Algeria this month, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has cast the presence of Islamists in the North African desert region known as the Sahel as the newest threat from terrorism confronting the West.
“We must frustrate the terrorists with our security, we must beat them militarily, we must address the poisonous narrative they feed on, we must close down the ungoverned space in which they thrive,” he said recently in Parliament.
On Wednesday, Mr. Cameron planned to fly to Algeria for the first visit there by a British prime minister since the country’s independence from France in 1962.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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 like his counterparts in Gao, he worried that the fighters might not have gone very far.
“They are in the bush. They are hiding,” he said. “One must be careful.”
Peter Tinti reported from Bamako, Rick Gladstone from New York, and Alan Cowell from London. Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris, John F. Burns from London, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington.
