French-led troops surround fabled Timbuktu

28 January 2013 - 15:37 By Sapa-AFP
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Malian refugees ride in the back of a truck transporting them on a dirt road from Timbuktu to the Mauritanian town of Fassala.
Malian refugees ride in the back of a truck transporting them on a dirt road from Timbuktu to the Mauritanian town of Fassala.
Image: AFP PHOTO / AL-AKHBAR NEWS AGENCY

French-led troops surrounded Mali's fabled desert city of Timbuktu Monday after seizing its airport in a lightning advance against Islamist insurgents who have been driven from key northern strongholds.

French paratroopers swooped in to block any fleeing Islamists while ground troops coming from the south seized the airport in the ancient city, which has been one of the bastions of the extremists controlling the north for 10 months.

"We control the airport at Timbuktu," a senior officer with the Malian army told AFP. "We did not encounter any resistance."

French army spokesman Colonel Thierry Burkhard told AFP the troops, backed up by helicopters, had seized control of the so-called Niger Loop -- the area along the curve of the Niger River flowing between Timbuktu and Gao -- in less than 48 hours.

A fabled caravan town on the edge of the Sahara desert, Timbuktu was for centuries a key centre of Islamic learning and has become a byword for exotic remoteness in the Western imagination.

The extremists who seized the town forced women to wear veils, whipped and stoned those who violated their version of strict Islamic law, and destroyed ancient Muslim shrines they considered idolatrous.

"We will liberate Timbuktu very soon," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told France 2 television channel. "Little by little, Mali is being freed.

"This has been a very complicated operation but until now very well managed," he said.

A source in a reconnaissance team which first reached Timbuktu on Sunday said Malian and French troops had not yet entered the city.

"We are in town but we are not many. But the Islamists caused damages before leaving. They burned houses, and manuscripts. They beat people who were showing their joy."

The advance into Timbuktu known as "the City of 333 Saints", which lies 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) north of Mali's capital Bamako, comes a day after French and Malian soldiers seized another Islamist bastion, the eastern town of Gao.

The French defence ministry said a French armoured battalion, Malian troops and soldiers from Niger and Chad were in control of Gao after fighting Saturday in which "several terrorist groups were destroyed or chased to the north".

French warplanes had carried out some 20 air strikes Saturday and Sunday in the Gao and Timbuktu regions, the ministry statement added.

Gao is the biggest of six towns seized by French and Malian troops since they launched their offensive on January 11 to wrest the vast desert north from the Islamists.

The largest town yet to be recaptured is Kidal further north near the Algerian border which was the first to be seized by an alliance of Tuareg rebels and Islamic extremists last year.

-- Reprisals, thousands of exiles --

Mali's lengthy crisis was kickstarted by a Tuareg rebellion for independence in January last year which overwhelmed the weak Malian army and prompted a coup in Bamako in March.

Amid the political vacuum the Tuareg desert nomads and Islamists seized the north in a matter of days. But the extremists had no interest in the Tuareg desire for independence and quickly sidelined their erstwhile allies to install sharia law.

The occupation of an area twice the size of France sparked fears abroad that northern Mali could become a new haven for terror groups, threatening the West as well as neighbouring African countries.

However plans to intervene remained mired in hesitation.

In early January the Islamists broke through into the government-held south, raising fears that the Islamists could seize the capital Bamako and prompting intervention by former colonial power France.

There have been reports of reprisal attacks and the killing of Tuaregs, a Berber people, and Arabs leading the rebellion against Bamako by Malian soldiers and the local people.

"We have already witnessed reprisals... and thousands of people going into exile fearing for their lives," said Corinne Dufka, a researcher from Human Rights Watch, urging immediate action from authorities to lower tensions.

At an African Union summit in Addis Ababa where leaders discussed increasing troop numbers for an African intervention force in Mali, outgoing chairman and Benin President Thomas Boni Yayi criticised the AU's slow response.

France's action, he said, was something "we should have done a long time ago to defend a member country".

Defence chiefs from West African regional grouping ECOWAS agreed Saturday to boost their troop pledges for Mali to 5,700. Chad, which is not a member of the 15-nation bloc, has promised an extra 2,000 soldiers.

France said Sunday it had now deployed 2,900 troops and that 2,700 African soldiers were on the ground in Mali and Niger, but French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault appealed for more aid for the Mali effort.

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