Despite their knowledge of the terrain and experience of guerrilla war, the rebels had chosen to fight like a conventional army, taking and holding cities, travelling along roads in vehicles that presented a clear target for French jets. Now they will revert to what they do much better: surviving as guerrillas in the desert.
Guerrillas' classic problem has been how to move from guerrilla warfare to holding territory. In this case, I don't think they could pass up the temptation: an entire country, ripe for picking, their own little (actually it's pretty big) Afghanistan on the road between north and west Africa. The Tuaregs had a beef and all they had to do was give the beef a Salafist flavor. It was Swat all over again, only better. The Bamako government fell apart, the usual kind of tired military coup led by some dishpit captain. The whole Malian army is 7,500 men. The ECOWAS force seemed (and was) reluctant to take on the turbans. Even if they did, they were supposed to get there sometime around September. In a purely African context, that is strictly a ground war against an ill-trained and poorly motivated African army, things looked pretty grand. It looked like the whole country was about to go under.
So what next? France has promised to stay put until Mali is stable but it does not intend to lead the effort. That job will fall to the Malian army as well as to African helpers. They will be sorely tested.
Going for the whole country, rather than just being content with oppressing the north, is what did the turbans in. They had to push into Diabaly, and they made no secret of the fact that Bamako was on the list. That would give the murderous branch of Islam a happy home right in the heart of West Africa. The Frenchies aren't blind, and when they put their little Gallic minds to it they're pretty good at strategizing. That's why they zipped in from Diabaly to Timbuktoo in jig time.
Mali's loose mix of jihadist and Tuareg rebel groups has dispersed. The lighter-skinned ones and ethnic Arabs tended to go north into the desert; the dark-skinned ones fled south to the arid farmlands.
The dark-skinned ones are the Malians and Nigerians and the Islamic riff-raff that likes wearing masks and waving guns, the bigger the better. The "lighter-skinned ones" seem to have had a heavy percentage of Paks mixed in with the Algerians and Mauretanians and such.
They are less united than before. The aim of the French and their Malian allies is to separate the religious zealots, hailing mainly from Algeria and beyond, from native Malians and the less fanatical rebels.
Mokhtar Belmokhtar's been a "Lion of the Desert" for a good, long time, an Islamic bandido making a good living kidnapping Europeans and holding them for ransom. The Tuaregs, who are Berbers, didn't like being shoved aside by the Arabs (and probably even less when a bunch of Paks showed up). "Azawad" wasn't going to be Tuaregland; instead it was going to be Jihadistan.
A splinter of the extremist Ansar al-Dine group may already be ready to talk. So may some of the Tuareg groups demanding autonomy if not independence. But the more defiant zealots may have the whip hand among the rebels in terms of cash and leadership. People in Diabaly, a town briefly occupied by the rebels earlier in January, said that Arabic-speaking foreigners were in command.
Kind of like if the French had taken over the 13 colonies after the Revolutionary War.
The diehard types are likely to carry on the fight. Though they used to concentrate on kidnapping and smuggling rather than launching terrorist attacks, some of them know how to make car-bombs and suicide vests. They may target Malian, French and other allied forces once they drop their guard in Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.
That's what the Qaeda arm expects to do, probably will do. Once they metastasize into an area they start setting up the car bomb and boom vest factories so they can export death and destruction to the countries around them.
Even after years of American training, the ill-disciplined Malian army on its own is no match for the rebels. Malian soldiers are alleged to have killed 16 unarmed Muslim preachers in a bus near Diabaly at the end of last year, perhaps associating them with jihadists. Many religious Muslims were outraged and may have become rebel sympathisers.
I don't think a single incident like that would turn a large number of people into rebel sympathizers. It might make people angry, but people of remotely normal mental processes would want the people who did it punished, rather than deciding it would be a good thing for an army of foreigners to take over the country. Plus, the rebels are Berbers, not the Bambara-speakers inhabiting the south, and the invaders are Algerians and Mauritanians and such.

I think Mali has a good chance of getting rid of the infestation, at least until the turbans begin recruiting Bambara-speakers. I think Boko Haram is much more the model than AQIM. But they seem (at this distance, through the distorting lens of news media) to be genuinely outraged at the sadism their intended Islamic masters brought with them.

[BLOGS.CHANNEL4] A large airless room in the back of the compound became the Sharia court. Here they and other prisoners were brought to sit in front of two or three Islamic judges who they call marabouts.

the judges were mainly Pakistanis and some Tunisians and the whole proceedings were overseen by the Moroccan jihadi in charge of the town, known as Abdel Karim

They said that the judges were mainly Pakistanis and some Tunisians and the whole proceedings were overseen by the Moroccan jihadi in charge of the town, known as Abdel Karim. As the judges passed sentence, a crowd of jihadi supporters behind them watched. Some of the women were flogged right there in the court house. A black patch in front marks the place where cigarettes were ground into the sand and smokers whipped. A few yards away is the stadium where the residents of Gao once watched football and were now forced to come to watch amputations.

One of the most disturbing things I've learnt is that those condemned to these harsh punishments were all black Malians -- Sonrai, Peul, Bamba, and Della, traditionally the slaves of the Tuareg. The jihadis were a mixture of Malian Arabs and Tuaregs as well as many foreign jihadis.