Mali’s last rebel stronghold falls AFTER about three weeks of severe fighting

The European power saidThursday that it was now expecting the deployment of the United Nations (UN)-backed Africa-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA) to support the second phase of the struggle - driving the al-Qaeda-linked fighters from their desert hide-outs.

Nigeria, the country with the largest military capability in West Africa, had since deployed 1,200 troops as part of the AFISMA coalition. Several hundred soldiers from West African countries - including Niger and Chad - are already in Mali. Nigeria originally planned to send 600. The proposal of gradual mobilisation rose to 900 before being pegged at 1,200.

Rebel forces seized northern Mali late 2011 in what many thought would not only be another African disruption of civil democratic order but one that carries a major terrorist threat to the rest of the world.

France’s foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told the Agence France Presse (AFP) yesterday that France intended to leave Mali “quickly”, and it was up to African countries to take over.

Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Olugbenga Ashiru, had told The Guardian as Nigeria prepared to deploy troops that the country had to move into Mali “to prevent the country from becoming a safe haven and training base for terrorists, who would come and join forces with extremists in Nigeria.”

Agencies’ reports variously said Thursday that the leader of Ansar Dine Iyad Ag Ghaly and Abou Zeid of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had now moved to the mountainous region north of Kidal. The historic city of Timbuktu and Gao (both now provincial capitals) had earlier fallen out of the hands of rebels.

Source:Guardian

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