France Invades Mali

[CountDeMoney]

French military intervention in Mali expands
By Edward Cody, Sunday, January 13, 1:40 PM

PARIS — Mirage 2000D fighter-bombers struck Islamist targets in northern Mali on Sunday, expanding the reach of a French military intervention, and more French ground troops flew into Bamako, the capital, for what increasingly looked like the beginning of a long campaign.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the Obama administration has promised to aid the antiterrorism operation in Mali by providing logistics help, satellite intelligence and in-flight refueling for French warplanes in what he qualified as a show of "total solidarity from the United States."

Le Drian, in a radio and television appearance, said that several planeloads of additional arrivals brought to 400 the number of French soldiers in Bamako to provide rear-area support and protect French citizens. Another 150, he added, have been deployed 300 miles to the north around Mopti, the main town near the line between government-controlled territory and the northern two-thirds of the country that has been ruled by Islamist militias for the past seven months.

Fears that a southward offensive by several Islamist militias was about to overrun Mopti led President Francois Hollande to order the unilateral French military intervention beginning Friday. Le Drian said the Islamist offensive, which was halted by French helicopter gunship raids and Mirage bombing runs, could have punched all the way to Bamako if Hollande had not acted swiftly, implying that Malian army defenses had collapsed.

The minister said more French troops and airplanes are on the way, including advanced Rafale fighter-bombers from bases in France. He did not say where they would be based in Africa. Mirage aircraft currently involved in the operation have been flying from nearby French bases, including one in N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, but some helicopters and other aircraft have been flying from a Malian air base at Sevare.

"There are raids all the time," Le Drian said.

Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based watchdog organization, said it had documented the killing of 10 civilians, including three children, in the French bombing Friday and Saturday around the disputed town of Konna, just north of Mopti.

In addition to the French deployment, several African countries have promised to dispatch soldiers immediately to form a vanguard of what eventually will become a pan-African intervention force. With French training and other help, the African force will be assigned to restore government authority over the 250,000-square-mile region that has become a terrorist haven.

"We will put into place the military deployment necessary to achieve our goals," Le Drian said. "France is at war with terrorism wherever it is to be found."

French officials indicated Hollande's strategy is to support the Malian army along the separation line near Mopti, providing air support and military advisers but letting Malian soldiers do the fighting. At the same time, they said, French airplanes will continue to bomb Islamist targets farther north wherever they can be detected.

Residents reported airstrikes Sunday against Islamist positions at Gao, one of the north's main cities. A militia spokesman contacted by telephone said fighter-bombers also attacked targets at Lere near the Mauritanian border and at Douentza, news agencies reported.

The French operation is scheduled to last in this form at least until an African force can be organized and Malian army units can be trained to send a joint force to restore government authority in all of northern Mali. That could take months, specialists predicted, raising the prospect that the French involvement could be long and risky.

This is particularly true because the Malian army has been largely leaderless since a bungled coup d'etat in March, led by Capt. Amadou Haya Sango. Moreover, the Malian leader who appealed to Hollande for help, Dioncounda Traore, is a provisional president with limited authority; he was installed after the coup in what was supposed to be a political reorganization on the way to new elections that were never held.

The main Islamist organizations in northern Mali are several branches of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Algerian-based group that long has thrived in the region on hostage-taking and cigarette trafficking; Ansar al-Dine, a Tuareg militia closely allied with AQIM, and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, an AQIM breakaway group.

The Azawad National Liberation Movement, another armed Tuareg group, drove Malian army forces out of the northern stretches of the country last April, exploiting the military coup that left the army command in disarray and the country without civilian leadership. Since then, however, the Tuareg secular movement has been pushed aside by AQIM and Ansar leaders who have imposed strict Muslim law and turned the area into a terrorist sanctuary.

Tuaregs, who differ ethnically from black people who populate the southern part of the country, have long sought — sometimes with arms — to separate or at least gain autonomy from the black-run government. Against that background, the plans for a black African intervention force to restore Bamako's authority seemed to raise the danger of long-term strife even if the AQIM and other terrorist leaders are forced to retreat into more remote areas.

A senior French security official recently acknowledged that the success of a foreign intervention in some measure depends on efforts by France and others to provide enough aid to the Azawad National Liberation Movement to persuade it to combat the Islamist militias alongside the Malian army and its African backers. So far, he said, that has not been achieved.

[CountDeMoney]

France fails to free intelligence agent held in Somalia; Paris sends more troops to Mali
By Edward Cody, Published: January 12

PARIS — As France reinforced its intervention forces in Mali with additional aircraft and soldiers, French commandos launched a failed raid on the other side of Africa in a vain attempt to rescue an intelligence officer held captive for 3½ years in Somalia, the Defense Ministry announced Saturday.

The unsuccessful overnight rescue attempt, in the Somali town of Bulomarer, was separate from President Francois Hollande's decision Friday to intervene on the ground and in the air to shore up the crumbling Malian army against Islamist guerrilla groups that have controlled the northern two-thirds of the country for more than seven months.

But both operations seemed to propel France into a position of new prominence in Western efforts to prevent Islamist terrorist groups from establishing themselves — as they did in Afghanistan and Somalia — in countries without solid state institutions that could become launchpads for attacks on European or U.S. interests in Africa or elsewhere around the world.

The failed rescue in Somalia, which cost France the lives of at least two people, dramatized the dangers facing the French military as it takes on the Islamist groups in hostile regions of northern Africa where they have taken root. The Mali-based extremists, for instance, hold seven French hostages and threatened retaliation for Hollande's willingness to dispatch French soldiers to help restore Malian state authority.

Four French hostages captured in September 2010 at a northern Niger uranium mine and two abducted in northern Mali in November 2010 are held by the region's main Islamist group, the mainly Algerian al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). A seventh French citizen was taken into custody two months ago on the Mali-Nigeria border by the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, an AQMI spinoff.

Some of their families have questioned Hollande's resolution to support the government in Mali, fearing it could lead to the execution of their loved ones. But Hollande has consistently replied that the threat of international military action was the best means of pressure on the hostage takers.

Failure in Somalia

The Somalia rescue operation was designed to liberate Denis Allex, the official identity of an agent of the French intelligence service, the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE). Allex and a colleague were abducted by Somali Islamists in July 2009, soon after the pair, posing as journalists, checked into a hotel in Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

In fact, reports at the time said, they were assigned by the DGSE to train the close protection squad of Somalia's beleaguered transitional government as part of a French military aid program. Allex's colleague escaped his captors a month later, but Allex remained in the Islamists' hands in what the Defense Ministry described as "inhumane conditions."

Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told a news conference that "everything indicates" Allex was killed by his captors as DGSE commandos assaulted his place of imprisonment at Bulomarer, an Islamist-controlled town about 70 miles southwest of Mogadishu.

During the fighting, one French soldier was killed and another went missing and may have been killed, Le Drian said. Seventeen members of the Somali al-Shabab guerrilla group were killed, the ministry said in a statement.

"The [French] victims' families have been informed," it added. "The Defense Ministry addresses them its most sincere condolences and joins in their grief."

Al-Shabab issued a statement after the clash claiming that Allex is still alive but will be "judged within two days" for his relation to the attack, suggesting he would be executed. A wounded French soldier is also in their hands, al-Shabab claimed, apparently referring to the soldier reported missing by Le Drian.

"In the end, it will be the French citizens who will taste the inevitable bitter consequences of the irresponsible attitude of their government with regard to the hostages," the group added.

Defense officials did not explain why they chose to launch the raid at the same time as France began its military intervention in Mali; Le Drian said the two were "totally unconnected." French experts suggested the DGSE decided to act because it had obtained new information that enabled them to pinpoint Allex's place of detention with a previously unavailable precision.

Mission in Mali

It was unclear what political fallout would flow from the failure in Somalia. Before the misadventure became known, leaders from across France's political spectrum had backed Hollande's decision to intervene in Mali.

But Herve Morin, a centrist who served as defense minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy, cracked the consensus, noting that France so far is alone in the Mali intervention despite Hollande's earlier insistence that he would step in only to help an African intervention force.

In a statement after meeting with his military staff, Hollande reiterated that the Mali operation would last as long as necessary but described it as preparation for the arrival of a putative African intervention force.

Le Drian said "several hundred" French ground troops and an unspecified number of aircraft were involved so far in the Mali intervention. A number of French soldiers were seen deploying in Bamako, Mali's capital, to protect French citizens.

A helicopter pilot became the first French casualty as gunship raids were carried out during the night against guerrillas along the line separating government- and Islamist-held territory around the town of Konna, 300 miles northeast of Bamako, the French Defense Ministry reported.

Le Drian credited the helicopter raids with turning the tide against the Islamist guerrillas seeking to move south from Konna toward the regional center of Mopti. Government spokesmen in Bamako affirmed that, following the French helicopter raids, Konna was back in army hands. But other reports said control of the town was still uncertain.

[CountDeMoney]

Obama: U.S. military entered Somalia's airspace

U.S. military combat aircraft "briefly entered" the airspace of Somalia Friday in support of a French-led rescue mission, President Barack Obama told Congress in a letter Sunday.

On Friday, French troops mounted an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a French national reported to be a French intelligence service agent captured in Somalia in 2009. The agent, believed to be held by the Islamic group Al-Shabaab, was reportedly killed in the raid, as was a French soldier. (More on the raid here from the Associated Press.)

Obama's letter does not mention the result of the military action in the farming village of Bulomarer on the Somali coast and describes the U.S. involvement in the episode as minor.

"United States forces provided limited technical support to the French forces in that operation, but took no direct part in the assault on the compound where it was believed the French citizen was being held hostage. United States combat aircraft briefly entered Somali airspace to support the rescue operation, if needed," Obama said in the letter. "These aircraft did not employ weapons during the operation. The U.S. forces that supported this operation left Somalia by approximately 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on January 11, 2013."

Obama's letter (posted here) says it was submitted "consistent with" the War Powers Resolution, the 1973 law imposing limits on the use of U.S. forces in combat situations abroad. Obama, like previous presidents, has not acknowledged the law's constitutionality.

[Phillip V]

Islamists Overrun Malian Garrison Town

Rebels now within 250 miles of Mali's capital. They were at 420 miles before French intervention.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/french-bomb-training-camps-supply-lines-of-malian-jihadists-in-north-battle-for-diabaly/2013/01/14/40ddfe6a-5e31-11e2-8acb-ab5cb77e95c8_story.html

[Duque de Bragança]

Now, I'm scared.
Photo taken in front of the French Embassy in London.

[Phillip V]

For reference from first invasion post:

"This operation will last as long as needed." -François Hollande

[Valmy]

Like the French are going to acknowledge terrorist threats not made in French.

[Viking]

Islamists Overrun Malian Garrison Town

Rebels now within 250 miles of Mali's capital. They were at 420 miles before French intervention.

How does this compare to the French Army's rate of advance from Metz to Dunkirk in 1940?

[Malthus]

Now, I'm scared.
Photo taken in front of the French Embassy in London.

I was expecting the last one to be holding a sign reading "Burma Shave". 

[The Minsky Moment]

So when are they going to drop Depardieu on the terrorists? take care of two problems in one throw

[The Minsky Moment]

Languish has 4 al-qaeda members; WTF?

[Lettow77]

 Previously my sympathies were with the gallant secessionists of the north, but I now move my support wholeheartedly to the peerless elan of French arms, which I am sure will once more win undying glory worthy of Europe's greatest state and one of the two poles of civilization.

[Viking]

Previously my sympathies were with the gallant secessionists of the north, but I now move my support wholeheartedly to the peerless elan of French arms, which I am sure will once more win undying glory worthy of Europe's greatest state and one of the two poles of civilization.

What made you change your mind?

[Lettow77]

 France wasn't involved beforehand, of course. But now a civilized power, preeminent even among civilized powers, has taken a hand.

[Barrister]

And Canada is helping out as well. 

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/14/harper-sends-c-17s-military-cargo-plane-to-mali-after-request-from-france/