Mohamed al-Zawahiri, younger brother of Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman, made a particularly intriguing statement in Cairo last month. Talking to that wonderful French institution Le Journal du Dimanche about Mali, he asked the paper to warn France “and to call on reasonable French people and wise men not to fall into the same trap as the Americans. France is held responsible for having occupied a Muslim country. She has declared war on Islam.” No clearer warning could France have received. And sure enough, one day later, suicide bombers attacked occupied Gao, while, exactly 10 days later, France lost its second soldier in Mali, shot dead by rebels in a battle in the Ifoghas mountain range.
Tag: French
Part I: Africa’s New Thirty Years’ War? Mali at first glance seems a most unlikely place for the NATO powers, led by a neo-colonialist French government of Socialist President Francois Hollande (and quietly backed to the hilt by the Obama Administration), to launch what is being called by some a new Thirty Years’ War Against Terrorism. Mali, with a population of some 12 million, and a landmass three and a half times the size of Germany, is a land-locked largely Saharan Desert country in the center of western Africa, bordered by Algeria to its north, Mauritania to its west, Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Niger to its southern part. People I know who have spent time there before the recent US-led efforts at destabilization called it one of the most peaceful and beautiful places on earth, the home of Timbuktu. Its people are some ninety percent Muslim of varying persuasions. It has a rural subsistence agriculture and adult illiteracy of nearly 50%. Yet this country is suddenly the center of a new global “war on terror.”
French defense ministry officials have said that they are planning to make a withdrawal from Mali by April. Since January 11, when the French military began to bomb and launch a ground invasion into this resource-rich country, the government in Paris has declared that its operations are limited and they were only there as a precursor to the intervention of a regional force from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Although several thousand troops from various African states including Chad, Nigeria as well as the national army of Mali have entered the battle alongside the French, the former colonial power also made an appeal for the United Nations to take over the operations which are really designed to secure the resources of Mali for the benefit of western industrialized states. Earlier UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had publicly stated that direct intervention by the international body would jeopardize its personnel carrying out humanitarian work inside the country and throughout the region.
France, U.S. Escalate Imperialist War in Mali and Niger French Socialist President Francois Hollande has visited Mali in an effort to claim victory over targeted Islamic groups based in the central and northern regions of this vast West African state. The president visited…
The Crimes of NATO’s Neocolonial Wars: Mainstream Media The Organs of State and Corporate Propaganda
“Mainstream media is nothing more than the propaganda organ of the powers that be” Belgian MP denounces the crimes of NATO’s neo-colonial wars. Although ignored by all major news media, one of the…
Special Forces deployed by Paris to Niger to “secure” uranium mines Reports emanating from the West African state of Mali indicate that French grounds forces accompanied by the national army from the capital of Bamako–along…
Who is behind the terrorist group which attacked the BP -Statoil-Sonatrach In Amenas Gas Field Complex located on the Libyan border in South Eastern Algeria? (see map below) The operation was coordinated by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of the Al Qaeda affiliated Islamist al-Mulathameen (Masked) Brigade, or “Those who Sign with Blood.” Belmokhtar’s organization has been involved in the drug trade, smuggling as well kidnapping operations of foreigners in North Africa. While his whereabouts are known, French intelligence has dubbed Belmokhtar “the uncatchable”. Belmokhtar took responsibility on behalf of Al Qaeda for the kidnapping of 41 Western hostages including 7 Americans at the BP In Amenas Gas Field Complex. Belmokhtar, however, was not directly involved in the actual attack. The field commander of the operation was Abdul Rahman al-Nigeri, a veteran jihadist fighter from Niger, who joined Algeria’s Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in 2005. (Albawaba, January 17, 2013)
France has deployed approximately 2,000 troops to carry out its war in the West African state of Mali. At least another 500 military personnel from the government of President Francois Hollande are reported to be…
Is the United States preparing to let the French hang out to dry in their dramatic military intervention in Mali? In the cynical game of big power rivalry, a setback for the old colonial patron in…
Obama’s illegal Libyan War is escalating into a greater disaster with over a thousand French troops fighting the Al Qaeda linked terrorists who have taken over Northern Mali and a hostage crisis in Algeria…