François Hollande’s visit turned into a huge party. The people of Timbuktu put on their most colourful clothes, danced and sang to music being belted out from loudspeakers and cheered the man who had delivered them from vicious Islamists to the skies.
The French President did not look like a triumphant Caesar. In his navy blue suit and tie and buttoned-up white shirt, he seemed instead to be taken aback as he was mobbed by the crowd. Even as Mr Hollande’s helicopter departed after that 3hr 48min trip two years ago, there were ominous signs that the breathtakingly swift 23-day campaign by French forces which had driven the jihadists back to the borders masked trouble lying ahead.
Malian soldiers were becoming casualties of land mines laid by al-Qaeda in Maghreb (Aqim) and their allies; there were ambushes on the roads to the north; there was a stand-off between French forces and their Malian partners who were not being allowed into parts of the town of Kidal because of fears that they would take murderous revenge on the Tuareg community who had been blamed for introducing strife into the country by starting a rebellion for a homeland.
The attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in the capital, Bamako last week, brought what has happened in Mali since the hope of that great day of Mr Hollande’s visit to Timbuktu into focus. A statement released yesterday in Paris that 40 members of French special forces took part in storming the hotel shows how Mali continues to need French military assistance almost three years on.
But Malians don’t necessarily see it that way, believing the French are in the country to defend their own interests. “If we are wrong and the French are being straight, then why are there so many criminal and terrorist gangs still here,” asked Ibrahim Maiga, a schoolteacher, yesterday.
“Is it the case that it is the presence of the French which is attracting the terrorists?”
Aqim is back. Its affiliate, al-Mourabitoun, has claimed credit for the assault on the hotel. When, on Sunday evening, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, said he doubted if al-Mourabitoun was responsible, there was momentary expectation that he would name Isis as the ones guilty. Instead, he said the Macina Liberation Front was to blame.
The name, unknown to most outside Mali, illustrates the multiplicity of violent extremists in the country. The Macina Liberation Front came to prominence in central Mali at the start of the year, led by a marabout, the religious leader Amadou Koufa, with a core of ethnic Fulani fighters. It killed 13 people, including five UN peacekeepers at the Byblos Hotel in the town of Severe in the summer.
Al-Mourabitoun, active in northern Mali, carried out the first major terrorist attack in Bamako in March, killing five people, including a Frenchman and a Belgian at a nightclub.
Aqim, which has its roots in the bloody Algerian civil war in the 1990s, is the largest and most well known of the Salafist groups in the Sahel and has killed hundreds of people in dozens of attacks in the region. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who organised the Algerian gas plant attack in 2013, killing 37 people, had led both al-Mourabitoun and Aqim in the past and has been the target of a number French and American assassination efforts.
Ansar al-Din, a Tuareg group, led by Iyad ag Ghaly, has also been linked to the Radisson raid. It captured Timbuktu during the Islamist onslaught of two years ago. It has demanded the establishment of an independent, Islamist homeland for Tuaregs.
The French military’s Operation Serval, which saved Mali from the jihadists, deployed a force of 4,000 with helicopter gunships, artillery and armoured cars. As the supposedly beaten enemy regrouped and began to infiltrate back in from neighbouring states in increasing numbers, Operation Barkhane was launched last year with 1,000 troops stationed in Mali and 2,000 more spread across Chad, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Niger. Malian troops, meanwhile, have received training from EU states including the UK.
It is clear that without French intervention, al-Qaeda would have swept through into the capital, Bamako. Despite the return of the jihadists, and continuing violence, it is the French presence which has introduced a degree of stability, helping to enable a peace deal to be struck between an umbrella group of Tuareg organisations and the government last Summer.
The Malian forces have improved significantly following training. As members of its special forces came out of the Radisson Blu after storming the hotel with American as well as French, help, there were cheers from the crowd.
Yet, there is often criticism of the French. “They are too close to the Tuaregs, they protect them,” said Major Ousmane, a recently retired soldier of 14 years. Some insist the French presence in Mali is primarily commercially motivated. Speaking in Bamako, businessman Amadou Sissoko, was convinced that “there are lots of minerals, precious metals, in the north, that’s why the French are there. It is in their interest to keep that area unstable.”
The Radisson Blu hotel was to have hosted meetings to implement the peace accord between the government and Tuaregs. “The jihadis are in different groups, but their goal is the same, to destroy the peace process,” said Sidi Brahim Ould Sidati, of the Co-ordination of Azawad Movements.
