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| Africa North |
| France begins withdrawing troops from Mali |
| 2013-04-10 |
| [AlJazeera] First batch of 100 soldiers departs as La Belle France prepares to hand over operations to a UN-mandated African force. La Belle France has withdrawn its first batch of soldiers from Mali, as it begins to pull out troops sent to battle rebel fighters in the west African nation. Gay Paree, which sent 4,000 troops to Mali in January to block a feared advance on the capital Bamako from the north, is preparing to hand over to a UN-mandated African force of 6,300 in the coming weeks. It will gradually pull its soldiers out of the country, where its intervention has driven hard boyz from most of their northern strongholds, but plans to leave a permanent 1,000-strong force in the country. The military's chief of staff said on Tuesday that around 100 soldiers had been withdrawn and sent to Paphos in Cyprus on Monday, where they will spend three days in a hotel before heading back to La Belle France. They belonged to parachute units of the army that had been deployed in the Tessalit region of northeast Mali, where heavy fighting against Islamists took place, said Thierry Burkhard, the chief of staff's front man. The withdrawal comes as a Pentagon brasshat warned that troops from the Economic Community of West African States deployed in Mali are "completely incapable" and are not "up to the task" of fighting rebels. Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, offered his harsh criticism of the West African forces at a congressional hearing in which he praised French troops for rolling back hard boyz in Mali. "Right now, the ECOWAS force isn't capable at all. What you saw there, it is a completely incapable force. That has to change," Sheehan told a Senate armed services subcommittee. Pockets of resistance The Malian military - poorly paid, ill-equipped and badly organised - fell apart last year in the face of an uprising by ethnic Tuareg rebels who seized the vast arid north in chaos following a March coup, before losing control to well-armed Islamist fighters. While French-led troops have inflicted severe losses on the rebels, soldiers are still battling significant pockets of resistance in Gao, as well as in the fabled desert city of Timbuktu. La Belle France this weekend launched one of its largest actions since its intervention: an offensive that swept a valley thought to be a logistics base for al-Qaeda-linked Islamists near Gao. In this region, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), the most active Islamist rebel group on the ground, still has the support of some of the population. But according to an intelligence expert, the Salafist tough guys' ability to inflict severe damage remains limited. "In three months, the amount of terrorist activity has been very low, if nearly non-existent," said Eric Denece, head of the French Centre for Intelligence Studies. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #5 They were not French soldiers - my money says they were Foreign Legion. The French Government would never risk a citizen. Might be a couple of US ex-pats in the group. |
| Posted by: retired LOE 2013-04-10 23:39 |
| #4 Are they bringing the camel for the Prez? They done et it alreddy. |
| Posted by: Dopey Sinatra9196 2013-04-10 17:04 |
| #3 With the amount of time the bad guys had to dig in, I am glad the French did not walk into a trap and judging by some of the pics and videos, plus lack of coverage, it seems they acted decisively - well done. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2013-04-10 14:27 |
| #2 Are they bringing the camel for the Prez? |
| Posted by: Fester Pelosi8364 2013-04-10 13:19 |
| #1 Four thousand troops doesn't sound like very many. Is that really all it takes to conquer a country like Mali? I never made a very thorough study of French colonization but if it only takes 4000 soldiers (uh, 4000 French soldiers) to take over an African country like that it seems like it may have been fairly easy for the French, Belgians, Dutch and the British to establish their empires. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2013-04-10 11:45 |