Salon.com > Islamist

French boots on the ground in Mali

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 13:30:00 +0000

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) -- French troops pressed northward in Mali toward territory occupied by radical Islamists on Wednesday, military officials said, announcing the start of a land assault that will put soldiers in direct combat "within hours."

French ground operations began overnight in Mali, Adm. Edouard Guillaud, the French military chief of staff, said on Europe 1 television. France's Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on RTL radio that soldiers were headed away from the relative safety of the capital toward the rebel strongholds in the north.

Residents of Niono, a city in the center of Mali which is just south of a town that was overrun by the jihadists earlier this week, said they saw trucks of French soldiers arrive overnight. The natural target for the French infantry is Diabaly, located 400 kilometers (250 miles) northeast of the capital and roughly 70 kilometers (45 miles) north of Niono. French warplanes have carried out airstrikes on Diabaly since the weekend, when a column of dozens of rebel vehicles cut off the road out of Diabaly and seized the town as well as its military camp.

US-approved weapons wound up with Libyan militants

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:58:00 +0000

The New York Times reported that the Obama administration secretly approved arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but later learned that the weapons were being turned over to Libya's Islamist militant fighters. According to the Times:

The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.

More than a year after the overthrow of Gaddafi, Libyan authorities have failed to establish full control over Libya’s disparate armed factions. According to the Times, "The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government."