{{Ansar Dine, an Islamist group occupying northern Mali, called Tuesday for other fighters to join them in political dialogue, as military chiefs plot strategies to expel the extremists using force.}}
As diplomatic efforts for a military solution to the seven-month occupation of Mali’s vast arid north intensify, Ansar Dine has dispatched envoys to Burkina Faso and Algeria in a bid to negotiate an end to the crisis.
After meeting with chief regional mediator, Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore, the Ansar Dine delegation urged “all the armed movements” to imitate it with the aim of establishing “an inclusive political dialogue.”
In a declaration read by envoy Mohamed Aharid, they called for “a total halt to hostilities, the respect of fundamental rights and freedoms, the return of all displaced people and refugees and the creation of an environment conducive to adopting and implementing a full peace agreement that addresses all the deep causes of the crisis.”
Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith, in Arabic) along with the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) have implemented an extreme form of sharia in the cities they control, stoning, whipping and amputating transgressors.
Ansar Dine has also destroyed centuries-old cultural treasures in the fabled city of Timbuktu which they denounced as “idolatrous” to their radical brand of Islam.
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