Updated with comment below.

In interviews with TIME on Monday, the preservationists [of Timbuktu’s centuries-old artifacts] said that in a large-scale rescue operation early last year, shortly before the militants seized control of Timbuktu, thousands of manuscripts were hauled out of the Ahmad Baba center to a safe house elsewhere. Realizing that the documents might be prime targets for pillaging or vindictive attacks from Islamic extremists, staff left behind just a small portion of them, perhaps out of haste, but also to conceal the fact that the center had been deliberately emptied. “The documents which had been there are safe, they were not burned,” said Mahmoud Zouber, Mali’s presidential aide on Islamic affairs, a title he retains despite the overthrow of the former president, his boss, in a military coup a year ago; preserving Timbuktu’s manuscripts was a key project of his office. By phone from Bamako on Monday night, Zouber told TIME, “They were put in a very safe place. I can guarantee you. The manuscripts are in total security.”

In a second interview from Bamako, a preservationist who did not want to be named confirmed that the center’s collection had been hidden out of reach from the militants. Neither of those interviewed wanted the location of the manuscripts named in print, for fear that remnants of the al-Qaeda occupiers might return to destroy them.

That was confirmed too by Shamil Jeppie, director of the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, who told TIME on Monday night, “There were a few items in the Ahmad Baba Library, but the rest were kept away.” The center, financed by the South African government as a favored project by then-President Thabo Mbeki, who championed reviving Africa’s historical culture, housed state-of-the-art equipment to preserve and photograph hundreds of thousands of pages, some of which had gold illumination, astrological charts and sophisticated mathematical formulas. Jeppie said he had been enraged by the television footage on Monday of the building trashed, and blamed in part Mali’s government, which he said had done little to ensure the center’s security. “It is really sad and disturbing,” he said.

After posting this last night, I thought I should add a question mark to the headline. At this point it doesn’t seem like anyone is in a position to accurately quantify how many of Timbuktu’s rare manuscripts might have been destroyed by the city’s Islamist occupiers before they fled. Although the Ahmed Baba Instititute, where fire damage was reported, is the principal facility housing Timbuktu’s treasures, there are dozens of family-owned libraries around the city containing thousands more manuscripts. None of the reporting I have seen indicates whether these collections were either secured or damaged.

While the fate of the manuscripts remains unclear, it’s easy for journalists to overplay a story that dovetails so neatly with the routing-of-the-barbarians narrative, rather than stick with what can actually be established at this time — which is not much.

A Quran from the 12th century in Timbuktu

Jonathan Jones writes: The reported destruction of two important manuscript collections by Islamist rebels as they fled Timbuktu is an offence to the whole of Africa and its universally important cultural heritage. Like their systematic destruction of 300 Sufi saints’ shrines while they held Timbuktu at their mercy, it is an assault on world heritage comparable with the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001.

The literary heritage of Timbuktu dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries when the gold-rich kingdoms of Mali and Songhai traded across the Sahara with the Mediterranean world. It took two months for merchant caravans to cross the desert, and while gold and slaves went north, books were going south.

In his Description of Africa, published in 1550, the traveller Leo Africanus marvels that in the bustling markets of Timbuktu, under the towers of its majestic mosques, the richest traders were booksellers.

They were selling manuscripts by Arab scholars on everything from astronomy and arithmetic to Islamic law, as well as mystical texts on Sufism, the otherworldly, saintly style of faith that the al-Qaida-affiliated Ansar Dine finds so offensive. [Continue reading…]

In a 2010 BBC documentary, Aminatta Forna tells the story of the lost libraries of Timbuktu.

The Guardian reports: Islamist insurgents retreating from Timbuktu set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts, according to the Saharan town’s mayor, in an incident he described as a “devastating blow” to world heritage.

Hallé Ousmani Cissé told the Guardian that al-Qaida-allied fighters on Saturday torched two buildings that held the manuscripts, some of which dated back to the 13th century. They also burned down the town hall, the governor’s office and an MP’s residence, and shot dead a man who was celebrating the arrival of the French military.

French troops and the Malian army reached the gates of Timbuktu on Saturday and secured the town’s airport. But they appear to have got there too late to rescue the leather-bound manuscripts that were a unique record of sub-Saharan Africa’s rich medieval history. The rebels attacked the airport on Sunday, the mayor said.

“It’s true. They have burned the manuscripts,” Cissé said in a phone interview from Mali’s capital, Bamako. “They also burned down several buildings. There was one guy who was celebrating in the street and they killed him.”

He added: “This is terrible news. The manuscripts were a part not only of Mali’s heritage but the world’s heritage. By destroying them they threaten the world. We have to kill all of the rebels in the north.”

On Monday French army officers said French-led forces had entered Timbuktu and secured the town without a shot being fired. A team of French paratroopers crept into the town by moonlight, advancing from the airport, they said. Residents took to the streets to celebrate.

Toronto’s Globe and Mail reports: Faster than expected, a French-led offensive has swept into two key towns in northern Mali, putting Islamist rebels on the run. But as the insurgents melt back into the Sahara wastes, the world is left with the same dilemma as before: how to rebuild a shattered state that remains a haven for terrorists.

It’s a challenge that Western donors will confront at a conference on Tuesday, when the African Union pleads for more than $400-million to allow thousands of African troops to remain in Mali for at least a year. But money alone is not enough to put the country back together.

Canada is among the countries that will consider pledging funds to support Africa’s military effort. Canada is already contributing a massive military transport plane for a 30-day mission in Mali, and is considering other non-military help.

By capturing the strategic city of Gao and pushing the rebels out of the fabled town of Timbuktu on the weekend, the French and Malian forces have regained two of the three biggest urban centres in northern Mali with surprising ease.

Thousands of people celebrated in the streets of Gao on Sunday, dancing to music that had been banned under the harsh rule of the Islamist extremists. They cheered the French and Malian troops, greeting them as liberators from radical militias that had ruled with brutal force, compelling women to wear veils and amputating the hands of accused thieves.

Meanwhile, the insurgents were reported to have abandoned Timbuktu after repeated French air strikes, while French and Malian forces took control of its airport and probed into the ancient town, cautious because of the risk of ambush or counterattack.

Of the three main northern towns, only the town of Kidal – much further north – remains in rebel hands.

Yet the battle for the main towns was always destined to be the easiest step in a vastly complex task. The insurgents have spent months preparing a network of caves and tunnels in the desert and mountains. They have dramatically expanded their weaponry and vehicles. And they remain an elusive foe, ready to strike back when Mali is vulnerable again.

France has neither the resources nor the will to remain an occupying power in Mali indefinitely. The task for Africa and the West now is to restore Mali’s crumbling military and government structures, filling the vacuum that had allowed the Islamist radicals to thrive for years.

Reuters reports: Residents of Mali’s northern town of Gao, captured from sharia-observing Islamist rebels by French and Malian troops, danced in the streets to drums and music on Sunday as the French-led offensive also drove the rebels from Timbuktu.

The weekend gains made at Gao and Timbuktu by the French and Malian troops capped a two-week whirlwind intervention by France in its former Sahel colony, which has driven al Qaeda-allied militant fighters northwards into the desert and mountains.

In Gao, the largest town in the north where the Islamist insurgents had banned music and smoking, cut off the hands of thieves and ordered women to wear veils, thousands cheered the liberating troops with shouts of “Mali, Mali, France, France”.

French special forces backed by Rafale fighter jets and Tiger helicopters had helped capture the town early on Saturday.

Among the celebrating Gao crowds, many smoked cigarettes, women went unveiled and some men wore shorts to flout the severe sharia Islamic law the rebels had imposed for months. Youths on motorcycles flew the flags of Mali, France and Niger, whose troops also helped secure the ancient town on the Niger River.

“Now we can breathe freely,” said Hawa Toure, 25, wearing a colorful traditional African robe banned under sharia for being too revealing. “We are as free as the wind today. We thank all of our friends around the world who helped us,” she said.

French and Malian troops also arrived at the weekend at the fabled Saharan trading town of Timbuktu, more than 300 km (190 miles) to the west of Gao, and were working to restore government control over the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A Malian military source said the French and Malian troops had met no resistance up to the gates of Timbuktu and controlled the airport. They were working on flushing out any Islamist rebel fighters still hiding in the city, a labyrinth of ancient mosques and monuments and mud-brick homes between alleys.

Al Jazeera reports: Since France launched its military intervention in Mali two weeks ago, the combined Malian and French forces have managed to quickly retake much of the country.

They have done so almost exclusively beyond the eyes of the media, an exceptional feat in the age of Twitter and livestreaming. Where journalists have been allowed to “embed” with French troops, they have been kept well away from operations and are restricted to marginal stories about logistics.

“In times of conflict, it is up to journalists and the media, and not the military, to determine the risks that they are willing to take to gather information,” the international media organisation Reporters Without Borders said in a statement denouncing the “media blackout” imposed by French and Malian military.

French officials have organised no press conferences in Bamako. Their press contingent in Bamako consists of a one-man band, whose main function is to refer media queries to Paris.

The Malian army has likewise restricted media access, barring journalists and human rights organisations from areas safely in its hands such as Konna and Sevare for some days. The lack of freedom of movement has also drawn criticism from aid groups, who say people are being blocked from fleeing the conflict.

On top of the roadblocks, communications have been cut wherever operations are underway, making it impossible to independently verify what is taking place.

Destin Gnimadi, a journalist at the daily Malian newspaper Le Prétoire, told Al Jazeera that the Malian defence ministry rarely gives press conferences or shares any information with the national media.

Jean-Paul Marthoz adds: The French army is often called la Grande Muette, or “the Great Silent.” The war in Mali confirms the French military’s well-deserved reputation of being secretive about front-line actions. “Locking the information is more in the culture of the French army than of the U.S. army,” says Maurice Botbol, director of La Lettre du Continent. In the first two weeks of military operations against Islamist militant groups in Mali, the French army has released only a blurry video of an air attack at an undisclosed location.

International journalists who have flown to Mali are kept far from the front lines. No journalist has been embedded with the Special Forces that have carried out the first assaults. Most reporters who receive the authorization to accompany the troops are limited to coverage of marginal stories, such as military preparations on the Bamako airport or the “progress of the troops to the North,” very far from the battlefields.

The roads to the North are blocked by a succession of checkpoints manned by the Malian army. “They are very nervous,” says Gérard Grizbec, a reporter with the public service TV channel France 2. “They have received stern orders from the French forces: ‘Don’t let yourself being overtaken by journalists.’ They usually ask us where we’re going, check our passport, and request an accreditation of the Malian Communications Ministry.”

And then they often turn the media away.

“All the reporters that travel to the North come back frustrated and furious to Bamako,” complains Jean-Paul Mari, special envoy for the newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur. “This is a war without images and without facts.” On January 22, the French channel i>Télé devoted a whole report to the difficulty of reporting. “We try to outwit the Malian army,” says its editor-in- chief, Lucas Menget. “It is like a cat-and-mouse game.” And up to now, it is a losing game for the press.

The Washington Post reports: The United States is significantly expanding its assistance to a French assault on Islamist militants in Mali by offering aerial refueling and planes to transport soldiers from other African nations, the Pentagon announced Saturday night.

The gesture comes amid a debate within the Obama administration about how deeply it should engage in the French effort to prevent Islamists from wresting control of the West African nation. French requests for more robust support from Washington raised a legal dilemma because U.S. law forbids foreign assistance funds to leaders that came to power through a coup. Mali’s military leaders, including some trained by U.S. troops, seized power last year by force.

“The French requested this support, and we believe it was important to move ahead,” a senior defense official said Saturday night, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss policy deliberations. “The U.S. has the most advanced refueling technology in the world, and we wanted to provide this support.”

The United States has concluded that the expanded assistance is legally sound because of France’s notification to the United Nations Security Council that its mission in Mali is being offered at the request of the African country’s government, which is fighting “terrorist elements,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Gregory said in a statement.

“Under these circumstances, the U.S. can lawfully provide support to France’s efforts in the armed conflict in Mali,” Gregory said. Gregory said the coup bars “foreign assistance funds,” not military support. [Continue reading…]

Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, an Algerian national and senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

In an analysis appearing in the New Internationalist last month, Jeremy Keenan, professor of social anthropology at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, explained how the current conflict in Mali is rooted in “a largely covert and highly duplicitous alliance” forged between Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and President George W Bush in the summer of 2001.

[T]he Bush administration and the regime in Algiers both needed a ‘little more terrorism’ in the region. The Algerians wanted more terrorism to legitimize their need for more high-tech and up-to-date weaponry. The Bush administration, meanwhile, saw the development of such terrorism as providing the justification for launching a new Saharan front in the Global War On Terror. Such a ‘second front’ would legitimize America’s increased militarization of Africa so as better to secure the continent’s natural resources, notably oil. This, in turn, was soon to lead to the creation in 2008 of a new US combat command for Africa – AFRICOM.

The first US-Algerian ‘false flag’ terrorist operation in the Sahara-Sahel was undertaken in 2003 when a group led by an ‘infiltrated’ DRS [the Algerian intelligence service] agent, Amari Saifi (aka Abderrazak Lamari and ‘El Para’), took 32 European tourists hostage in the Algerian Sahara. The Bush administration immediately branded El Para as ‘Osama bin Laden’s man in the Sahara’.

In 2002, a … plan was presented to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board. Excerpts from its ‘Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism’ were revealed on 16 August 2002, with Pamela Hess, William Arkin and David Isenberg, amongst others, publishing further details and analysis of the plan. The plan recommended the creation of a ‘Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group’ (P20G as it became known), a covert organization that would carry out secret missions to ‘stimulate reactions’ among terrorist groups by provoking them into undertaking violent acts that would expose them to ‘counter-attack’ by US forces.

My new book on the Global War On Terror in the Sahara (The Dying Sahara, Pluto 2013) will present strong evidence that the El Para operation was the first ‘test run’ of Rumsfeld’s decision, made in 2002, to operationalize the P20G plan. In his recent investigation of false flag operations, Nafeez Ahmed states that the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was told by a Pentagon advisor that the Algerian [El Para] operation was a pilot for the new Pentagon covert P20G programme.
[…]
Since the El Para operation, Algeria’s DRS, with the complicity of the US and the knowledge of other Western intelligence agencies, has used Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, through the almost complete infiltration of its leadership, to create a terrorist scenario. Much of the terrorist landscape that Algeria and its Western allies have painted in the Sahara-Sahel region is completely false.

The Dying Sahara analyzes every supposed ‘terrorism’ incident in the region over this last, terrible decade. It shows that a few are genuine, but that the vast majority were fabricated or orchestrated by the DRS. Some incidents, such as the widely reported Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb attack on Algeria’s Djanet airport in 2007, simply didn’t happen…

In order to justify or increase what I have called their ‘terrorism rents’ from Washington, the governments of Mali, Niger and Algeria have been responsible on at least five occasions since 2004 for provoking Tuareg into taking up arms, as in 2004 (Niger), 2005 (Tamanrasset, Algeria), 2006 (Mali), 2007-09 (Niger and Mali)…

Around the time of the El Para operation, the Pentagon produced a series of maps of Africa, depicting most of the Sahara-Sahel region as a ‘Terror Zone’ or ‘Terror Corridor’. That has now become a self-fulfilled prophecy. In addition, the region has also become one of the world’s main drug conduits. In the last few years, cocaine trafficking from South America through Azawad to Europe, under the protection of the region’s political and military élites, notably Mali’s former president and security forces and Algeria’s DRS, has burgeoned. The UN Office of Drugs Control recently estimated that 60 per cent of Europe’s cocaine passed through the region. It put its value, at Paris street prices, at some $11 billion, with an estimated $2 billion remaining in the region.

While it will be clear from all this that Mali’s latest Tuareg rebellion had a complex background, the rebellion that began in January 2012 was different from all previous Tuareg rebellions in that there was a very real likelihood that it would succeed, at least in taking control of the whole of northern Mali. The creation of the rebel MNLA in October 2011 was therefore not only a potentially serious threat to Algeria, but one which appears to have taken the Algerian regime by surprise. Algeria has always been a little fearful of the Tuareg, both domestically and in the neighbouring Sahel countries. The distinct possibility of a militarily successful Tuareg nationalist movement in northern Mali, which Algeria has always regarded as its own backyard, could not be countenanced.

The Algerian intelligence agency’s strategy to remove this threat was to use its control of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to weaken and then destroy the credibility and political effectiveness of the MNLA. This is precisely what we have seen happening in northern Mali over the last nine months.

In an interview last week, Scott Horton asked Keenan to further substantiate his claim that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has been supported by the Algerian government.

In this segment of the interview, Keenan describes a large camp deep in the Algerian Sahara in which AQIM fighters were trained while the camp was being supplied by the Algerian army and intelligence service.

The existence of this camp has been known by Western intelligence services for two or three years since at least two of these men were arrested in Europe. Keenan has been able to interview these AQIM members and then cross-check the information they provided with information he has gathered from independent sources.

Since 2008, much of that camp has been moved down into northern Mali, forming the base of the Islamist forces that have now taken over the area.

McClatchy reports: On Jan. 14, Diakaridia Doumbia locked his door, climbed to the second floor and peered down from his mud-brick home at a swarm of cocaine-drugged Islamist rebels who’d captured the town of Diabaly earlier that day.

The towering retired soldier, now graying, placed a call to a friend in the Malian military.

“They are outside my house. They look like they are packing their cars to keep driving,” he reported. Soon after, French jets swooped down and struck, obliterating several of the cars and incinerating their inhabitants.

Later, Doumbia received a call. This time, the man on the other line wasn’t Malian.

“It was the French commander. He called often, and we talked. I told him where the rebels were and what they were doing,” said Doumbia, who served in the Malian military from 1974 until 2007.

The French beat back the sudden Islamist advance south into Diabaly with heavy air power, but it turns out they had some help: Doumbia and a spontaneous network of residents who responded to the capture of their farming community by risking their lives to channel intelligence out of the town.

“Everyone was calling,” said the mayor, Oumar Diakite, who was out of town when Diabaly was attacked and then was summoned by the governor. Diakite compiled the reports in real time – working next to detailed computer grids of the area that had been saved from U.S. development projects in the area’s complex canal system – and reported the coordinates to the military, which relayed them to the French command.

The townspeople’s response will pose a serious problem for the rebels if it’s replicated elsewhere. Fighting an insurgency against a more powerful force is hard, but it’s even harder without local complicity.

Part of the town’s disgust stemmed from the intruders’ behavior, and one trait in particular: Many of the outsiders, some of whom belonged to the regional al Qaida group and quickly banned cigarettes in the town, apparently were druggies.

Doumbia and one other Diabaly resident reported watching the rebels regularly taking cocaine. A third resident reported seeing emptied, white-coated bags lying around and said everyone knew what was inside them.

“We saw them sniffing it, smoking it. Some were injecting it,” Doumbia said.

A bag of white powder was flung outside the gate of a friend’s house after one bombing raid, the contents equal to half a kilogram of sugar. Doumbia sent a child to fetch it and confirm its contents, he said, but it was already gone.

Experts say the Sahara desert in West Africa, with its loose borders and weak governments, is rapidly becoming one of the prime cocaine-trafficking routes in the world. Its lucrative windfall is thought to help finance the Islamist rebels, and a legion of fighters dependent on the drug might make finally squelching the insurgency even more difficult. [Continue reading…]

Karima Bennoune writes: Before the recent French intervention in Mali began, 412,000 people had already left their homes in the country’s north, fleeing torture, summary executions, recruitment of child soldiers and sexual violence against women at the hands of fundamentalist militants. Late last year, in Algeria and southern Mali, I interviewed dozens of Malians from the north, including many who had recently fled. Their testimonies confirmed the horrors that radical Islamists, self-proclaimed warriors of God, have inflicted on their communities.

First, the fundamentalists banned music in a country with one of the richest musical traditions in the world. Last July, they stoned an unmarried couple for adultery. The woman, a mother of two, had been buried up to her waist in a hole before a group of men pelted her to death with rocks. And in October the Islamist occupiers began compiling lists of unmarried mothers.

Even holy places are not safe. These self-styled “defenders of the faith” demolished the tombs of local Sufi saints in the fabled city of Timbuktu. The armed groups also reportedly destroyed many churches in the north, where displaced members of the small Christian minority told me they had previously felt entirely accepted. Such Qaeda-style tactics, and the religious extremism that demands them, are completely alien to the mainstream of Malian Islam, which is known for its tradition of tolerance.

That openness is exactly what the jihadists seek to crush. “The fact that we are building a new country on the base of Shariah is just something the people living here will have to accept,” the Islamist police commissioner in the town of Gao said last August. Until military action began this month, local citizens were on their own in resisting the imposition of Shariah — and they fought back valiantly. A radio journalist was severely beaten by Islamist gunmen after speaking on the radio against amputations. Women marched through the streets of Timbuktu against Islamist diktats on veiling until gunfire ended their protest.

The acting principal of a coed high school in Gao told me his school had been occupied by militants from the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa. They announced that they had come to protect the premises. Instead, they quickly stole its computers, refrigerators and chairs. “We consider ourselves under occupation,” the principal told me. “We consider ourselves martyrs.” He has risked his life to keep his school open, to continue to educate boys and girls together, though he must put them on opposite sides of the classroom now. “My presence creates hope for my students. I cannot kill this hope,” he told me. [Continue reading…]

Those who see foreign intervention as a universal evil are fond of the expression: this can’t end well. Yet this ideological opposition to intervention — a stance which presupposes that intervention necessarily leads to a negative outcome — also presupposes that there is something inherently benign about non-intervention.

Beneath the reasonable expectation that outsiders are frequently in danger of making a problem worse because they have failed to understand its complexity — a failure all too common in American efforts to shape the world in its own image — there is just as often the attitude: I am not my brother’s keeper. It’s not my problem, nor my responsibility.

The crucial issue, however, is not to intervene or not intervene; it is: who is calling for the intervention? Has there been a plea for help from people in need, or is help being imposed by those who presuppose they know what is good for others?

And this question points to the hubris that lurks so often in the seemingly humble guise of non-intervention. It declares that even when pleas for help are loud and clear, they should politely be ignored because they are coming from people who don’t really understand what is in their own interests.

To Malians, Syrians, and Libyans, the underlying message from anti-interventionists is essentially the same: we feel your anguish but we really can’t help. We’re clumsy. Our governments are led by fake humanitarians who really only want to plunder your resources. And besides, our economies are ailing and we need to focus on our our own nation-building. Maybe the UN and the NGOs can help you out, but we have to take care of ourselves and so do you.

In my pointed criticism of anti-interventionism, I’m not arguing against negotiation. Political conflicts demand political solutions. But those who assume that right now French troops in Mali can only do harm are perhaps more naive than the flag-waving Malians who greeted the troops’ arrival.

Alghabass Ag Intalla

The Associated Press reports: Mali’s rebel movement showed new signs of discord on Thursday in the wake of punishing French air strikes, with one wing of the Ansar Dine group now pledging to negotiate an end to the country’s crisis and possibly even fight against its former comrades-in-arms.

France’s air and land campaign that began two weeks ago to save Mali’s embattled interim government has shaken up the military landscape and put the international spotlight on the former French colony. Mali’s government was on a new political defensive, urging its soldiers to respect human rights after new allegations that they had carried out summary executions in zones of battle against the radical Islamists.

Three al-Qaida-linked extremist groups have controlled Mali’s vast northeast for months, capitalizing on chaos that followed a coup d’etat in Mali’s capital, Bamako, in March. But in a new sign of splintering, former Ansar Dine leader Alghabass Ag Intalla told the Associated Press on Thursday that he and his men were breaking off from Ansar Dine “so that we can be in control of our own fate.”

“We are neither AQIM or MUJAO,” he said of the other groups, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and the Movement for the Unity and Jihad in West Africa, known by its French-language acronym. “We are a group of people from the north of Mali who have a set of grievances that date back at least 50 years.”

The comments suggested that at least some of Islamist fighters are searching for an exit in the wake of the French airstrikes. French radio RFI reported earlier Thursday that Intalla’s new group will be called the Islamic Movement for the Azawad, a Tuareg term for northern Mali, and his men are willing to fight their former comrades-in-arms in Ansar Dine.

“We are not terrorists. We are ready to negotiate,” Intalla told the AP. [Continue reading…]

Americans focus on work and making money, more than anything else. They don’t have time to spend hours drinking tea and socializing. And they know very little about the outside world.

These are the ‘stereotypes’ that Malians project on Americans.

Or, to put it another way, Malians understand Americans surprisingly well even if most Americans don’t know the first thing about Malians or their country.

This glimpse of Malians is provided by Demba Boundy, an independent journalist and English teacher in Bamako, during a conversation with Robert Wright.

Some viewers might treat Boundy’s assessment of the likely success of France’s intervention in Mali with skepticism, but I doubt very much that there will be many visitors to this site who can claim to be more knowledgeable about this West African state or the surrounding region.

(On one point, the size of the Tuareg population, when Boundy says they only amount to 2% of the population, I think this might be misleading — at least based on what I can glean from Wikipedia. The whole Malian population of 14.5 million is very unevenly divided between the north and south with only 10% of the population in the north. The estimated size of the Tuareg population is 450,000 — though this must fluctuate since they are nomadic. That would mean that in northern Mali, about 30% of the population is Tuareg.)

At Bridges from Bamako, Bruce Whitehouse identifies each of the musicians in the video above and where they come from, and provides his own translation of the lyrics. He goes on to write:

On the surface, this looks like an anti-war song. The lyrics repeat the notion that Malians constitute one family, sharing the same blood, the same mother and father. Kinship is the strongest idiom governing social relations in Mali, and rhetorical appeals to kinship have great power to end conflict.

Yet this song also carries a message of defiance. Even as some artists decry war (as Kouyaté points out, Malians really aren’t used to it), others exhort their audience to set aside their differences and mobilize in defense of the fatherland (faso). Tiken Jah and Master Soumy are not alone in urging Malians to get ready for war. Ethnomusicologist Ryan Skinner of Ohio State University tells me the verse by griot singer Babani Koné begins with

a dramatic “sow wèlè,” or “calling of the horses.” This staple form of the griot verbal art… connotes the gathering of forces in preparation for conflict, for war. [Koné] calls on the horses (“sow“) and their “great warrior princes” (“sukèlèmansadenw“) to converge. This suggests that the Malians she calls on (literally) may not like war, but they are not unprepared for it.

A bit later, Oumou Sangaré sings “N’an m’an cɛ siri Maliba bɛ bɔ an bɔlɔ dɛ,” which I translate above as “If we don’t get ready, Maliba will slip away from us.” The verb k’i cɛ siri literally means to tie one’s waist – like girding one’s loins to prepare for a fight. When they sing about standing together, I suspect the message is directed more at Bamako’s still-divided political class than at their rebellious northern compatriots. These Malians want the world to know that while they hate war, they’re now facing an enemy that does not share their disposition to dialogue and compromise. They will do what’s necessary to defend their country.

The multiethnic, multilingual display of artistry in “Mali-ko” is an inspiring reminder of another thing I’ve come to love about Malian society: its long history of peaceful conflict resolution and inter-group harmony. Yet the absence of the country’s best-known Tuareg musicians from this project is conspicuous. The project’s lone participant of Tuareg ethnicity is Ahmed Ag Kaedi, leader of the group Amanar. I can’t avoid wondering if he was only pressed into service after Mali’s more famous Tuareg artists (Tinariwen, Tartit, Takamba Super Onze) either espoused the separatist cause or had to flee Mali fearing for their safety. Many Tuareg viewing this video are probably wondering the same thing.

Nonetheless, the most important message from the artists behind “Mali-ko” is that the Malian people are ready and willing to stand up to the threat before them. The Malian armed forces, still reeling from a string of battlefield defeats, badly need to hear this message. Mali is a place where words can conjure victory even in the darkest hour.

“Residents of the town of Niono, near the frontline, spend time outside a local restaurant,” says the caption to a photo appearing in the Washington Post on Sunday.

It wasn’t what the artist intended, but there turned out to be something prescient about depicting light-skinned people eating chicken in this dusty impoverished town in the Ségou Region of Mali.

Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum tweets:

The sole hotel in #niono #Mali served50+ journalists chicken for 3 days. Now we’ve all left. And all the chickens in town have bn eaten.

— Lindsey Hilsum (@lindseyhilsum) January 22, 2013

War correspondents always like to say they are near or at the frontline. The action gets confused with the story — even when reporters are perfectly aware that the audience back home (wherever that might be) is essentially none the wiser to be told that Islamist fighters have either advanced into or fled from Diabaly or whatever else the news of the day might be.

Telling the story of what’s happening in Mali doesn’t force the press to swarm around the charred remains left after each skirmish, yet war reporting is driven by imagery more than anything — images that convey the effects of violence but often little more.

If journalists didn’t insist on moving as a pack and took longer developing more informative stories, they might not end up depriving the locals of food that can hardly be spared.

At his blog, Dekhnstan, Nasser Weddady puts the conflict in Mali in historical context. The idea that the current fighting is fallout from the NATO intervention in Libya has been popularized by Glenn Greenwald and others, yet that analysis conveniently ignores the fact that the jihadi presence in northern Mali, long pre-dated Gaddafi’s fall.

By the time Qadhafi’s regime in Libya fell, northern Mali had been home to Jihadi elements that left Algeria a decade earlier after being thoroughly defeated in the civil war. By 2002, remnants of Algeria’s GIA [from which GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) splintered and later changed its name to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)] found sanctuary behind the borders away from their nemesis the Algeria’s army. They were also attracted by the allure of making easy money by partnering in the flourishing Saharan smuggling commerce. Drugs, tobacco, weapons and stolen cars provided a lucrative alternative to war.

Jihadis made new and strange bedfellows in that period. Mali, Algeria, Mauritania and Senegal army officers started to skim off the new source of wealth. Getting a cut from the smuggling revenues in exchange for looking the other way was the the policy for almost a decade. Jihadis venture capitalism extended to an even more lucrative business: kidnapping western hostages all over the Sahara yielded over 90 Million Euros over a decade. Unlike the conspiracy theorists and snake oil merchants claim, things are a tad more complex in reality, and at times, even more unflattering to our world’s big powers.

Time and again, European nations chose to negotiate, and pay ransom money. Germany, Italy, Spain, France cut deals with hostage takers not thinking much of it. After all, Europe’s politicians thought the savages were deep in the Sahara and did not pose much of a threat beyond their forsaken deserts. Or at best, let the Malians deal with them. Complacency was Europe’s strategy.

Slowly but surely, the region became a Jihadi Eldorado. The modus operandi was very simple: why get killed trying to create an Islamist emirate in “apostate-ruled” neighboring countries when you can build your own sanctuary AND have the West pay for it? Even better, now that you are flush with cash, blend into the local communities. Those whom you cannot buy, you marry. To Azawadis the offering was: Bamako [the Mali government] cannot build you a water well? Here’s a cash wad of Euros, go build it yourself.

Once the nexus was set up, there was no going back. The joint Franco-Mauritanian operations of 2010 and 2011 were just grandiose hostage release operations. By then, the United States had been pursuing its own classical approach of throwing money at problems it cannot deal with. Development programs were set up in Mali to reward the democratic progress. Military assistance in the form of training for the Malian military was ongoing. The US even tried very hard to get the neighboring countries to start a meaningful cooperation.

Algerians were miffed by the suggestion that they should be told what to do about their own security. Morocco was scheming and trying to make itself relevant in a problem it has nothing to do with just to score points over Algeria. Burkina Faso and Mauritania were fighting their own covert wars by proxy. Mali’s government was doing nothing meaningful about the Jihadis in Azawad. Instead it was locked in a war of words with Mauritania’s General Aziz who seemed intent on humiliating then President Amadou Toumni Touré for daring to oppose his coup of 2008.

When it was not busy blogging from Germany on its Maghrebia news website, America’s Africa Command (Africom) in charge of the Sahel region, was in earnest trying to make sense of this maze of interests, pushing for a regional command to deal with the lawless mess that Azawad was slowly progressing.. All things considered, these efforts’ ultimate outcome is not encouraging because yet again their premise is profoundly flawed: no country around Mali, or in West Africa has the muscle, nor the will to engage in an open war which in essence is a nation-building exercise.

All of these schemes and plans became moot by the time Ansar Dine’s columns pushed south from its Azawadi sanctuary. The skeleton of an untested idea became a doctrinal principle in France’s Operation Serval: we will stop the Jihadis, but the Africans will have to go north and defeat the enemy– said France. This plan of an ECOWAS force that will spearhead the fight with the backing of the African Union, and the necessary paperwork from the UN Security Council is a recipe for disaster. Rotten and corrupt militaries, commanded by equally corrupt leaders cannot be a credible partner once the shooting starts. This line of thinking owes a lot more to post-colonial discourses than it does to the practical matter of drying out the northern Malian jihadi swamp.

The other principle complicating matters is Africa’s biggest taboo. Today, no one is willing to recognize that Mali, like most of Africa, is an artificial construct. Just like the Middle East’s levant, countries were created without much thought of whether they made sense for those destined to live in them. Ethnic groups with competing cultures were condemned to live in them. Maybe they will end up making sense in the future, but just as in Mali, that will cost a lot of blood and treasure. [Continue reading…]

The band Tinariwen and its members sing and talk about the first Tuareg rebellion which began shortly after Mali gained independence from French rule.

Mark LeVine writes: The dispatching of French soldiers to beat back rapidly advancing Salafi militants in northern Mali represents the convergence of multiple circles of blowback from two centuries of French policies in Africa. Some date back to the beginning of the 19th century, others to policies put in place during the last few years. Together, they spell potential disaster for France and the United States (the two primary external Western actors in Mali today), and even more so for Mali and the surrounding countries.

Only two outcomes, together, can prevent the nightmare scenario of a huge failed state in the heart of Africa spreading violence across the continent. First, the French-led assault on the north must manage to force most of the Salafi fighters out of the populated areas presently under their control and install a viable African-led security force that can hold the population centres for several years. If that weren’t difficult enough, French and international diplomats must create space for the establishment of a much more representative and less corrupt Malian government, one which can and will negotiate an equitable resolution to the decades long conflict with the Touareg peoples of the North, whose latest attempt violently to carve out a quasi-independent zone in the north early last year helped create the political and security vacuum so expertly, if ruthlessly, exploited by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib (AQIM) and its allied radical groups.

The first and largest circle of blowback returns to French colonial policy in North and West Africa, which was responsible for the creation of most of the states that are involved in the present conflict. France began deliberately to colonise large swaths of West Africa at the start of the 19th century, gaining control of what today is Mauritania and Senegal by 1815, followed by the invasion of Algeria in 1830, Tunisia in 1881, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and the French Sudan (which would become Mali) – in the 1890s, Niger in 1903-4 and Morocco in 1912.

It is impossible to know how the map of Africa would have evolved without European colonialism to shape it. What is sure, however, is that the European “scramble for Africa” that dominated the 19th century – and in which local rulers played a willing part whenever it served their interests – ensured that European powers would create the territorial foundation for modern nation-states whose borders bore little correspondence to the ethnic and religious geography of the continent. Mali in particular was composed of several distinct ethnic, linguistic and what today are considered “racial” groups. Its brief and ill-fated union with Senegal at the time of independence in 1960 highlights the artificial foundation of the region’s states and their borders. [Continue reading…]

Howard W French writes: Pundits who bang on about the events in Mali on television today speculate glibly about the possible linkup of militant Islamic movements in places like Mauritania, Mali, Algeria, and northern Nigeria, potentially constituting a vast sea of Muslim radicalism and hostility to the West. They would do better to understand that such currents are inherent to the politics and culture of this region and are in no way a recent import. Rejection of borders and of the European drawn states is as old as the borders themselves, and Islam has always played a central role in this, as intellectual base, religious justification and rallying catalyst. These currents have been given added force and coherence by the age-old movement of peoples and ideas via pastoralism, overland pilgrimage to Mecca and the existence of large, sprawling and aggrieved transnational ethnic groups — like the Tuareg, Hausa, and Fulani, to name three — whose interests were never considered by the imperial mapmakers.

Most of those who write on today’s crisis seem to ignore that the Tuareg, who are a key to events in Mali, have been sporadically fighting for decades against the country of that name we see on the map. During a visit I made to Timbuktu in the 1990s, Tuareg rebels fired mortars into the town that landed within meters of my hotel with no prior warning, scrambling tourists and creating a state of emergency.

As for other rebel groups in the region, their general pattern has been to raise tensions like this, forcing the government, in effect, to sue for peace by offering money, talks about greater autonomy, or other concessions. What was new this time had less to do with the presence in the equation of an al Qaeda spinoff than with the fact that there has been no government worthy of the name in the capital, Bamako, since a military coup overthrew the elected president last March.

Before we start breaking out hammers in search of nails, this crisis should serve as a powerful reminder of the necessity of much stronger preventive diplomacy in Africa in general, a thread that runs through major crises in Rwanda, the Congo and most recently Côte d’Ivoire. When I spent time in Mali in the summer of 2011, Western diplomats seemed scantily informed and almost blasé about the situation there; this at a time when the political cognoscenti was already warning of an advanced state of rot that involved mounting corruption, drug trafficking, and high-level dawdling over rising Islamic militancy.

However, even the best diplomacy, which we clearly haven’t had in Africa, won’t change the fact that the Sahel is in for a period of extended unrest and uncertainty. Its vastness contains some of the most sparsely inhabited real estate anywhere, peppered here and there by far-flung population centers with little economic viability or connection to the outside world. Places like these are easy to attack and hard to hold, and the militants’ game of blackmail for greater resources is extremely tempting.

Whatever the political or religious labels of the militants, however, the biggest driver of turmoil in this region in the future will be population. The peoples of the arid Sahel have some of the highest birth rates in the world, and there is little prospect that they will be able to accommodate the quadrupling or more of their populations, as projected by the U.N., before century’s end. Under such scenarios, Mali will go from 16 million or so today to 75 million people. Even poorer Niger, next door, will surge from today’s similar population base to 125 million.

Explosions like these will make a mockery of the political map of Africa that is familiar today, as major ethnic clusters outstrip the claims of the present-day states to govern them. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb surely must be dealt with now, but over time it will be the least of our worries.