French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian arrived in Mali today on a surprise visit to French troops who are engaged in a battle to flush Islamist militants out of their mountain stronghold in the north.
The Defence Ministry announced that Le Drian had travelled to the Ametetai valley in the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains where French and Chadian forces are engaged in fierce fighting with three Islamist groups.
Addressing troops in the town of Tessalit afterwards Le Drian said: “In dislodging the jihadists from their last bastions you are the bridgehead of this ongoing war that France decided to wage against terrorist groups still operating in Mali.”
Around 4 000 French troops are deployed in Mali under Operation Serval, which was launched in mid-January to halt the advance of the al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels south towards the capital Bamako.
Four French soldiers and at least 26 Chadian troops have been killed in combat. Most of the losses took place in the mountains to which the rebels retreated as French and Malian forces swept through the north in January, freeing most towns from the fundamentalists’ control.
Le Drian paid tribute to the dead troops. He is also scheduled to visit the northeastern town of Gao, which has come under sporadic rebel attack since being liberated in January, as well as the capital Bamako, according to French media reports.
Two months after the start of the intervention France is preparing to start drawing down its troop numbers.
Yesterday, President Francois Hollande said he would start withdrawing troops in April as the offensive in the mountains shows “success … including terrorist leaders who have been killed.”
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that “several hundred terrorists” had been killed in the region but assured in an RTL radio interview Thursday: “That does not mean we’ll leave from one day to the next.”
Transitioning to an UN peacekeeping mission “will take a certain time,” he said.
Plus, a hasty withdrawal of French forces could embolden the militants to regroup, he said. “That would make no sense,” he added, pointing to “sizeable pockets of terrorist groups” still operating in the Gao area, where a French soldier was killed Wednesday in an ambush.
The identity of the dead militant leaders is still unclear.
Chad last week announced that a leader of the al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb group, Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, and a dissident AQIM leader who ordered January’s hostage-taking at an Algerian gas plant, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, had both been killed.
Fabius said the French army was carrying out DNA tests on the bodies of dead fighters to identify them.
Analysts say that restoring security in Mali will require a political solution for the grievances of the northern populations as well as a military victory.
Mali’s government announced Thursday it had set up a commission tasked with trying to reconcile feuding communities.
The 33-member Commission on Dialogue and Reconciliation will have an initial two-year mandate to engage social and political forces in dialogue, and register human rights violations.
SABC
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