abu dardar 2014
Dadi Ould Chouaib, also known as Abou Dardar, was arrested on June 11 in the flashpoint “tri-border” region between Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, the site of frequent attacks by jihadist groups, the military said in a statement.
He was carrying “an automatic weapon, a night vision telescope, a combat vest, a telephone and a radio”, but surrendered without resistance.
[December 14 2020 British Light Dragoon contingent to Gao ]
A 300 strong Light Dragoon task group has joined over 14,000 peacekeepers from 56 Nations in Mali.
The advanced party led by Lieutenant Colonel Tom Robinson, the Commanding Officer of the Light Dragoons, flew out to Mali on board a LXX Squadron A400M Atlas transport aircraft initially with the main contingent followed on 3rd December on board another Atlas, which after a refuelling stop at Gibraltar flew into Gao Mali. Prior to this deployment the personnel have been in an isolation bubble to ensure that all COVID-19 precautions have been taken and which will allow them to join a similar bubble in Mali.
On November 30, 2020, cities of Kidal, Gao and Menaka in northern Mali were hit by simultaneous rocket attacks. The attacks targeted the military camps housing international forces. A camp for peacekeepers belonging to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) and soldiers for France’s Operation Barkhane was targeted along with two other military camps.
[September 22 2020 Operation Newcombe, more Brits, fewer French? ]
In a three-year mission named Operation Newcombe, the first of 300 British troops have arrived in Mali to bolster the UN peacekeeping mission there, with the rest due to follow within a week. More than 5,000 French troops have underpinned the operation, but President Emmanuel Macron is under pressure to reduce his forces. The quality of governance encourages separatist movements.
[September 22 2020
Ba N’Daou
There was widespread frustration with the inconsistency of political leadership from ex-President Keïta in Bamako and a sense that too few members of the governing class were really focused on fully implementing the 2015 peace deal with northern Tuareg separatists.
Procrastination over demobilising separatist fighters and devolving power and money to the regional level has fuelled a mood of disillusion in which terrorism can persist.
Exasperation at this state of affairs seems to have been a major factor behind the 18 August military coup – whose leaders included several officers with experience of the difficult conditions faced by the military in the north.
[ Ba N’Daou interim president ]
Mali’s former defence minister, Ba N’Daou, has been named as president of the country’s new transition government. N’Daou was once an aide-de-camp to Mali’s ex-dictator Moussa Traore, who died last week aged 83.
A retired colonel, N’Daou received training in the former Soviet Union as well as at Paris’s renowned Ecole de Guerre.
[ Jihadists want to have a territorial presence ]
Flush with new recruits and weapons captured from overwhelmed state forces, the jihadists have turned to mediation in a bid to further entrench their local control. “They want to have a territorial presence,” he said. “If the population is with them, they won’t denounce them to the army.” Spokesmen for the presidency and the army did not respond to requests for comment on the jihadists’ recent intervention in rural Mali before the military takeover.
[August 26 2020 EU freezes training missions ]
“We don’t train the armies to be putschists,” he said, adding that the most prominent coup leader was trained in Russia, while others were trained in the UK and the US.
[August 21 2020 European troops remain ]
Assigned to MINUSMA, begun in 2013, are 13,000 UN “blue helmets,” including currently some 900 German troops stationed mainly in Mali’s restive Gao desert region, where Goita led infantry units from 2002 to 2008.
Since 2018, Britain has had some 100 soldiers assigned to France’s 5,100-strong Operation Barkane, and has agreed to provide 250 British troops to MINUSMA starting this year.
In addition, the European Training Mission in Mali comprises 620 military instructors from 28 European countries, to train and equip Mali’s army and more recently troops of neighboring G5 Sahel nations, including Niger and Chad.
There has been anger among Malian troops about pay and the conflict with jihadists, which has seen scores of soldiers killed in the past year.
The Usual Suspects
Colonel Assimi Goita
Colonel Assimi Goita has presented himself as leader of the new military junta, which is calling itself the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) but little is known about him.
Deputy head of the Kati camp Col Malick Diaw
Col Malick Diaw is the deputy head of the Kati camp where the mutiny started
There is very little information about him apart from reports that he recently returned from training in Russia.
He stood next to Air Force deputy chief of staff Col-Major Ismael Wagué who read a statement on Wednesday on behalf of the junta to announce the military takeover.
“Colonel Diaw is believed to be the leader of the mutiny at Kati camp, 15km [nine miles] from Bamakoi. He is said to have asked the president of the republic to leave power before 02:00 pm [1400GMT],” a tweet about him said.
Col Camara is a former director of the Kati military academy.
Mali Tribune website reported that he was born in 1979 in Kati, in Mali’s southern Koulikoro region.
He graduated from the Koulikoro military academy with top honours. He was then deployed to northern Mali where he served under Gen El Hadj Gamou until 2012.
Col Camara later became the director of Kati military academy, a position he held until January 2020 when he went to Russia for military training.
The newspaper the Mali Tribune said that he returned to Bamako earlier this month to take his one-month leave.
“Col Camara was appreciated by everyone where he worked and is respected and adored by all his subordinates. To them, he represents righteousness, seriousness and determination,” the website said.
Gen Cheick Fanta Mady Dembele
Gen Dembele is a graduate of Saint-Cyr military academy in France. He also graduated from the General Staff College of Koulikoro, Mali. He holds a degree in history from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.
He also has a master’s degree in civil engineering and graduated from the German Federal Army University in Munich.
[August 18 2020 Bew elections promised ]
Mutineers’ spokesman Colonel-Major Ismael Wague invited Mali’s civil society and political movements to join them to create conditions for a political transition. the Economic Community of West African States suspended Mali from its institutions, and closed its member states’ borders with Mali. Having previously warned it would no longer tolerate military coups in the region.
Wague 2014
[August 18 2020 President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in custody of Army troops ]
President, Prime minister arrested by troops
Prime Minister Boubou Cisse had earlier appealed for dialogue and urged mutineers to stand down, before dropping from view. Two security sources said President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita had been seized and the African Union said Cisse was also in detention.
[April 20 2019 Protests; PM and all other ministers resign ]
The office of president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita announced the resignation of prime minister Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga and all other ministers late on April 18 2019. Legislators had discussed on April 17 2019 a possible motion of no confidence in the government due to both recent killings and its failure to disarm militias or tackle Islamist militants. Much of the northern half of the country remains outside government control.
[March 17 2015 Dutch helo down near Gao ]
Royal Netherlands Army AH-64D Apache
Captain René Zaben and first lieutenant Ernst Mahadevan
The crashed helicopter was together with another Dutch Apache over uninhabited terrain doing a shooting exercise with ground targets. The fellow fliers landed directly and provided first aid. Zaben had died. Mahadevan was seriously injured and was transferred to a French military hospital in Gao. He died there from his injuries.
[March 6 Francafrique’s Operation Liza]
French and Sahel 5 troops combat terrorist armed groups in the Sahel-Saharan Strip.
Operation Liza has some 3 000 troops
150305-Operation Liza: current situation
In Mali, a sixth group tactics combined (GTIA) Malian, bearing the name of “Al Farouk”, completed on 21 February EUTM Mali training mission. The mission of the European Union, with sixty french military, has formed five Malian battalions which bear the symbolic or totemic names, centered in five military regions . All these battalions have been, at one time or another, deployed in operations.
Operation Liza has gathered 3 000 troops whose mission, in partnership with the countries of the Sahel G5[Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso ], is to combat terrorist armed groups that can act in the Sahel-Saharan Strip.
[June 7 2003 Francois Hollande wins UNESCO peace prize]
RQ-1 / MQ-1 Predator said to be in Mali
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Hollande has promised to put an end to “Francafrique” – a term used to describe the political, economic, and military relationship between France and its former African colonies, that Paris long used to insure its sphere of influence on the continent.more
[March 19]
Through last week, Air Force C17 Globemasters had flown 47 missions to Mali, ferrying 975 French troops and more than 1,200 tons of equipment and supplies to the fight against Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb rebels for control of northern Mali, according to Defense Department figures.
The Air Force had also flown 83 refueling missions delivering more than 544,000 gallons of gas to French Rafale and Mirage attack aircraft in close air support of French and Chad troops.
[March 3]
The elite Chadian unit fighting in Mali was trained by U.S. special operations forces who have been working in Chad, Chadian and U.S. officials said this weekend
[February 23]
The United States will increase its forces in Niger to 100, with 40 arriving February 21. The 40 troops were almost all Air Force personnel and that their mission was to support drone flights.
[February 15]
In a written statement provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. David M. Rodriguez, who is poised to become the next leader of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, estimated that the U.S. military needs to increase its intelligence-gathering and spying missions in Africa by nearly 15-fold.
“I believe additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities are necessary to protect American interests and assist our close allies and partners,” he wrote in the statement, which was released Thursday during his confirmation hearing. ”The recent crises in North Africa demonstrate the volatility of the African security environment.”
[January 29]
The United States and Niger signed a status of forces agreement Monday, which will provide legal safeguards for any American forces in the country. The Pentagon secures such agreements for base arrangements or troop deployments. U.S. officials said discussions with Niger on a drone base were at an early stage. The immediate impetus for a drone base in the region is to provide surveillance assistance to the French-led operation in Mali. “This is directly related to the Mali mission, but it could also give Africom a more enduring presence for I.S.R.,” one American military official said Sunday, referring to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
A handful of unarmed Predator drones would carry out surveillance missions in the region and fill a desperate need for more detailed information on a range of regional threats, including militants in Mali and the unabated flow of fighters and weapons from Libya. American military commanders and intelligence analysts complain that such information has been sorely lacking.
According to current and former American government officials, as well as classified government cables made public by the group WikiLeaks, the surveillance missions flown by American turboprop planes in northern Mali have had only a limited effect.
Crescent Shift 