space image of Northwest Niger, Northeast Mali, and southern Algeria, showing the Azaouad / Azawad / Azawagh region and surroung geographic regions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Why is it that the US must clean up the messes that Paris creates, and then get sucked into never ending wars. Wasn’t it France that led America into Vietnam, and wasn’t if France that took a willing US into Libya.
It is now abundantly clear that it was Qaddafi that was keeping the Sahara together. Eliminate him, the entire balance of power has hit a tectonic shift. The shards have lacerated government from Algeria to Mali. The war on Libya may have sold planes, but it is destroyed the equilibrium in Africa.
The outgoing US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did what she does best blame it on the evil-doers and their “safe haven” in Mali.
On cue the US lapdog David Cameron reiterated the “global threat” requiring a response that would take “years, even decades”!
“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,” he said. David Cameron
Pakistanis should be dancing in the street–another war, another focus. The number of drones moved to Yemen, and to Niger.
Like the NCIS Franchise that has no limits on the number of cities it focuses on, the media will blame it all on Al-Qaeda of the Mediterranean
Niger River in Mali, 2001. Just south of the Sahara Desert in Africa, the Niger River creates a lush area of wetlands and lakes in an otherwise arid environment. In this true-color MODIS image from October 18, 2001, the Niger enters at left as a thin strip of green and flows northeast through Mali. The river then turns south and heads into the country of Niger. (Note, this is at the end of the rainy season, showing the Niger Inland Delta in dark green). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
, the AQ of the River Niger and AQ of the Sahara. All will forget that the insurgency in Sahara and Sahel, which stretches across the desert regions of Mali, Algeria, Libya, Niger and Mauritania, is to the Tirug and Azawad.
In the post-Qaddafi era, this new militancy emerged in North African countries directly attributable to the so called “Arab Spring” in Libya etc.
The groups that are in charge are the Ansar Dine – dominated by former Tuareg rebels – and the “Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa” (Mujao), and various other Awazad liberation movements.
The Ansar Dine is totally a Tuarag home-grown movement arising out of the turmoil in Libya.
The source of the Niger River and the location of Timbuktu weren’t known to Europeans. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“The post-colonial structural problems of these countries have yet to be resolved.” Read Awazad and the Tuarag!
The Tuareg separatists of National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) are banding together with the Ansar Dine led by the former Tuareg rebel leader, Iyad Ag Ghaly.
After French forces invaded last month, a faction called the “Islamic Movement for Azawad” split off from the from Ansar Dine, and rejected “all forms of extremism and terrorism”. “The Signed-in-Blood Battalion” has risen to oppose the occupation.
It Vietnam all over again. Before the occupation, there were the Talibs, after the occupation a dozen other groups rose and then splintered into a dozen more–destabilizing the entire region.
The French and alter US occupation of Vietnam destroyed Laos, Cambodia, and all of Southeast Asia
