Just over a month ago President Francois Hollande of France answered its former colony’s plea for help: Mali has steadily seen the collapse of state control as Islamist rebels advanced from the north to the south gaining more and more territory whilst also imposing harsh Islamist law. The 4,000 troops that have been deployed to Mali are there to fight off the advancement of Islamist militant rebels from the north of the country. So far the French have been successful in regaining the territory that the rebels had taken, such as the ancient city of learning, Timbuktu.
To most Western minds, Mali is considered the most marginal of places in the African desert, but it is home to African Islam. The city of Timbuktu, located on a timeless crossroads of trade, developed as a marketplace of ideas for centuries, open to learning from afar and respected by saintly scholars who came on pilgrimage and stayed. Their manuscripts are housed in Timbuktu’s ancient celebrated desert libraries and it is their mosques and shrines that the al Qaeda-related militia are busy trying to destroy. Thus it is worth considering what kind of jihad are the militants fighting and what form of Islam are these extremist ‘Islamists’ trying to impose when it is their own historical and scholastic areas of learning that they are destroying?
As with most African states Mali has experienced a tumultuous past few decades since it gained independence in 1960. During the first decades of its independence Mali was politically and socially unstable; it suffered many droughts, rebellions, a coup and 23 years of military dictatorship. However, in the early 1990s Mali experienced rapid economic growth after the country held its first democratic elections in 1992; the presence of democracy made for relative social stability.
Nonetheless, throughout this time the threat of instability still remained a cause for worry. In the early 1990s the nomadic Tuareg of the north began an insurgency reportedly in connection with issues to do with land and cultural rights. This persists to this day, despite central government attempts at both military and negotiated solutions. The insurgency gathered pace in 2007, and was exacerbated by an influx of arms from the 2011 Libyan civil war. The Saharan branch of al-Qaeda was quick to move into this increasingly lawless area, and seized control of the North where the Tuareg roam after the March 2012 military coup; effectively separating from the rest of Mali and establishing a harsh form of Islamic law.
The West African regional grouping Ecowas agreed to launch a coordinated military expedition to recapture the north at a meeting in Nigeria in November, with UN backing. However with preparations expected to take several months, the Islamists took the initiative and began to advance towards the government heartland in the south-west. Alarmed at the capture of the town of Konna, the government in Bamako asked France to intervene militarily. French troops rapidly overran Islamist strongholds in the north and regained lost territory.
However, the question remains whether now that the Islamists have been overrun and territory recaptured will stability ensue? It could be debated that the country will now face a form of guerrilla warfare with assassinations and terrorist-like activity taking place as we have seen in Nigeria with the Islamist jihadist movement Boko Aram (literally translated as ‘Western Education is Forbidden’).
It is evident that France felt that military intervention in the form of sending in troops was essential. The threat of extremist Islamist activity spreading across borders and gaining a stronghold is not one that the West is keen on seeing happen. Radical Islam can already be seen in many North African states. These religious movements linked to radical Islam can be seen in countries such as Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Libya and Mali, as well as on the coasts of the Indian Ocean in countries such as Somalia, and Kenya.
It is clear to see that the recent hostage-taking on the gas-plant in Algeria is not a separate incident from the intervention in Mali- but a reaction to it. The radical Islamist movements in North Africa are all connected creating the worrying prospect for Western powers (who wish to restain the threat of a large-scale uprising). Al Qaeda, known as AQIM, has networks in Algeria, Morocco, Mali, Mauritania, Libya, Niger and Nigeria and it was the AQIM, which has high presence in Algeria, with numerous cells known as the “Signers in Blood” (S.B.), that in January 2013 seized the Amenas gas plant and took hostage as many western workers as possible and killed up to 40 people from 9 different countries.
Far from having solved the issue of the Islamist uprising in Mali, we now have to deal with, according to David Cameron, the problem of the Sahara desert being turned into a haven for militant Islamists who are waging a jihad against the West. “What we face is an extremist, Islamist, al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group. Just as we had to deal with that in Pakistan and in Afghanistan so the world needs to come together to deal with this threat in north Africa.” In reaction to France’s intervention Omar Ould Hamaha, a militant Islamist leader, has declared that France “has opened the gates of hell [and] has fallen into a trap much more dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia”. Have the West bitten off more than it can chew when it comes to radical Islam?
Sources:
Information: igeo.tv; guardian.co.uk; bbc.co.uk
Photos: Reuters; AFP; The Economist