Opération Serval : les forces françaises et tchadiennes s'emparent de Tessalit
Mise à jour : 08/02/2013 13:28

Dans la nuit du 07 au 08 février 2013, une opération aéroterrestre a été menée dans la zone de Tessalit, au nord du Mali.
vlcsnap-2013-02-08-13h17m21s167

Des éléments français des forces spéciales ont été parachutés sur l’aéroport de Tessalit afin de sécuriser la piste. Un poser d’assaut est venu renforcer les premiers éléments qui se sont infiltrés en vue de sécuriser l’aéroport. Les renforts d’une cinquantaine de soldats du 1er RCP, initialement basés sur Kidal, ont été acheminés par l’escadron de transport des forces spéciales afin de renforcer ce dispositif et de permettre aux forces spéciales de lancer des patrouilles en vue de s’assurer du contrôle de la ville.
Parallèlement, le SGTIA blindé du 1er RIMA, a réalisé un raid blindé de plus de 500 kilomètres à partir de Gao afin de rejoindre dans la matinée du 08 les éléments français dans la zone de Tessalit. De leurs côtés, les éléments des forces armées tchadiennes sont partis de Kidal dans la journée du 07 février afin de rallier ce dispositif.
Cette opération, menée en toute discrétion a été exécutée avec l’appui d’hélicoptères et d’appareils de l’armée de l’air qui ont réalisé pour cette seule nuit plus d’une trentaine de sorties dont une douzaine dédiée aux frappes afin de sécuriser la zone.

Sources : EMA
Droits : Ministère de la Défense

Timbuktu Training Site Shows Terrorists' Reach
Until just a few weeks ago, the bombed-out customs-police building on Timbuktu's desert fringe was a bustling training center, locals say, where Islamist militants learned to fix Kalashnikovs and launch shoulder-fired weapons.

Deserted after a French airstrike in late January, this site—and several like it across Timbuktu—was populated not only by local al Qaeda-linked Islamist militants. Timbuktu also served, locals say, as a training ground for hundreds of members of Boko Haram, a militant group based more than 400 miles to the southeast, in Nigeria. The Nigerians trained here for about 10 months, intermingling with a local al Qaeda offshoot called Ansar Dine, according to a man who said he was hired to cook for the two terrorist groups. "Every day I saw people coming here, saying they want to sign up," said the man, kicking rubble through a sandy lot littered with Russian shells. His description of the militants' activities matched those offered by four neighbors.The presence of Nigerian trainees here validates recent fears among regional and Western intelligence officials that parts of the Sahara have become incubators where al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, is training Africans to fight jihad.
Recent militant attacks on Western targets—U.S. consular facilities in Benghazi, Libya, and an Algerian natural-gas site—have fueled concerns over AQIM's push into North Africa. But Boko Haram's presence here shows how this desert has also been used as a base to raise the sophistication of an insurgency to the south, in Africa's most populous country. Well over 200 militants arrived in Timbuktu in April 2012, locals say, after AQIM swept into this isolated city. They arrived in about 300 cars, the cook said, an account that roughly matched the number of Toyotas that residents say pulled up to the customs building around then.

About 50 Boko Haram militants lived and trained at the customs building, locals say, and 50 more lived in an annex across a giant sandy lot. Others, they say, took up in other abandoned government buildings.
On Jan. 20, French jet bombed the customs building, as part of its three-week-old military campaign in Mali. Now, French flags fly over Timbuktu's old-world alleys. Children play on tanks abandoned by al Qaeda and their allies. On Friday, France's government announced that President François Hollande would travel to Mali over the weekend.

But threats appear to remain: Several days before the French strike, locals say, the militants disappeared into the desert.

For years, officials in the U.S. and Nigeria have scrutinized potential links between AQIM and Boko Haram, whose bloody campaign to install Islamic law in Nigeria has killed 2,800 people, according to Human Rights Watch. A 2011 car bombing that killed 26 people at a United Nations office in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, bore similarities to al Qaeda suicide attacks on U.N. offices elsewhere. Nigeria's latest move against Boko Haram came Friday, when a gunbattle between soldiers and suspected Boko Haram members killed 18 people in northern Nigeria, the Associated Press reported, citing a Nigerian military spokesman.

In Timbuktu, neighbors say AQIM ran a sophisticated war college from several abandoned buildings. Here, judging by locals' accounts of the training, Boko Haram militants gained skills to allow them to expand beyond their typical quick-hit bomb strikes. On dunes just west of the customs house, Boko Haram fighters fired shoulder-fired arms, the cook and four neighbors said—though it couldn't be determined if they were describing sophisticated rockets or more rudimentary mortars. In its Nigeria attacks, Boko Haram appears not to have used shoulder-mounted weapons.

Within a week of the foreign militants' arrival, the al Qaeda-backed groups began offering jobs to locals. A gunman came to the cook's door, looking for someone fluent in the language of Nigeria's north, Hausa—which the cook had learned in Kumasi, a trading town in Ghana with a large Hausa population. They paid him about $20 a day, he said, to cook for Ansar Dine and Boko Haram. A restaurateur said he sometimes brought tubs of couscous and spaghetti to the training camp, but said the Boko Haram fighters didn't extend much courtesy to locals. "They are extremely rude," said the restaurateur, adding: "They pay whatever price you want."

On a typical day, after rising before dawn to pray and read the Quran, the militants ran five laps around the sand-choked lot, the size of several football fields, said the cook and neighbors who witnessed the exercises. After push-ups in the sand, the militants ate a breakfast of bread and powdered milk. They then met with specialists, the cook said. He described an arms specialist from Pakistan, who he said taught Boko Haram and Ansar Dine members how to break apart and reassemble assault rifles, over and over again. There was a computer specialist who appeared, to the cook, to be mostly occupied making fliers extolling the fundamentalist cause. A heavy arms specialist who the cook said was from Afghanistan told militants how to breathe steadily when firing a shoulder-mounted rocket.

"Swear to God, every day, new people, they come," said Moulhar Arby, a girl in the earthen-wall house next door to the customs office. "Nobody knows how they come here."

Commanders from Boko Haram and Ansar Dine gave newcomers 4,000 West African CFA, the local equivalent of $8, to enlist, the cook said. After training, he said, recruits were given about $300—their first taste of money following months of sharing bathrooms with scores of militants. A folded stack of notebook paper discovered on the sandy lot appears to record the recruitment. In Arabic, it lists hundreds of names, most followed by the number 4,000.

Days before the French bomb hollowed out the customs building, the Nigerians sneaked away, neighbors said. Every night, a few came back to toggle the lights, these people said, an effort they believed was meant to convey to surveillance planes above that Boko Haram was still in Timbuktu.

Quelle: Wallstreet Journal

Mali War Shifts as Rebels Hide in High Sahara
Just as Al Qaeda once sought refuge in the mountains of Tora Bora, the Islamist militants now on the run in Mali are hiding out in their own forbidding landscape, a rugged, rocky expanse in northeastern Mali that has become a symbol of the continued challenges facing the international effort to stabilize the Sahara.
Expelling the Islamist militants from Timbuktu and other northern Malian towns, as the French did swiftly last month, may have been the easy part of retaking Mali, say military officials, analysts and local fighters. Attention is now being focused on one of Africa’s harshest and least-known mountain ranges, the Adrar des Ifoghas.

The French military has carried out about 20 airstrikes in recent days in those mountains, including attacks on training camps and arms depots, officials said. On Thursday, a column of soldiers from Chad, versed in desert warfare, left Kidal, a diminutive, sand-blown regional capital, to penetrate deep into the Adrar, said a spokesman for the Tuareg fighters who accompanied them. “These mountains are extremely difficult for foreign armies,” said the spokesman, Backay Ag Hamed Ahmed, of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, in a telephone interview from Kidal. “The Chadians, they don’t know the routes through them.”
These areas of grottoes and rocky hills, long a retreat for Tuareg nomads from the region and more recently for extremists from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, will be the scene of the critical next phase in the conflict. It will be the place where the Islamist militants are finally defeated or where they slip away to fight again, military analysts say.

French special forces are very likely already operating in the Adrar des Ifoghas, performing reconnaissance and perhaps preparing rescue operations for French hostages believed to be held in the area, said Gen. Jean-Claude Allard, a senior researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris. But African forces are likely to be assigned the brunt of the combat operations, going “from well to well, from village to village,” General Allard said.

The few Westerners who have traveled in this inaccessible region bordering Algeria say it differs from Afghanistan in that the mountains are relatively modest in size. But its harsh conditions make it a vast natural fortress, with innumerable hide-outs. “The terrain is vast and complicated,” said Col. Michel Goya of the French Military Academy’s Strategic Research Institute. “It will require troops to seal off the zone, and then troops for raids. This will take time.”
The number of militants who remain is in dispute, with estimates varying from a few hundred fighters to a few thousand. They are becoming more dispersed and are hiding themselves ever more effectively, Western military officials say.
The French military has been flying fewer sorties over the region in recent days, “from which I deduce a lack of targets,” said a Western military attaché in Bamako, Mali’s capital, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “They are just not finding the same targets. Clearly they are hiding better and dispersing more widely.” A ranking Malian officer stationed in the northern town of Gao said: “We don’t know how many there are. They have learned to hide where the French can’t find them.”

The militants are versed in survival tactics in the hills, supplying themselves from the nomads who pass through and getting water from the numerous wells and ponds, said Pierre Boilley, an expert on the region from the Sorbonne. Still, the sources of water are an opportunity for the French and Chadian forces, as they can be monitored without too much difficulty, experts said.

“It’s a sort of observation tower on the whole of the Sahara,” General Allard said. The fighters have had years to build installations, modify caves, and stock food, weapons and fuel, he said, and the precise locations of their refuges remain a mystery.

Even if the bulk of the militants have retreated into the mountains, pockets remain around the liberated towns of Timbuktu and Gao, said a French military spokesman, Col. Thierry Burkhard. Last week, French forces patrolling the area around Gao engaged in firefights with militants, some of whom fired rockets, officials said. “We’re encountering residual jihadist groups that are fighting,” said Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s defense minister.

On Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a military checkpoint in Gao, wounding a soldier, an act that provided further evidence of the continued threat of the militants. The attack, from an insurgent reported to have ties to the militants who carried out the recent hostage-taking on the internationally managed gas field in eastern Algeria, could signal the opening of a campaign against French and African forces, a senior United States intelligence official said Friday. “This is what they’re going to do — I.E.D.’s and small attacks,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, referring to improvised explosive devices, the homemade bombs that were the hallmark of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With France insisting that its presence in the country will be short-lived, more attention has been focused on the liabilities of the tattered Malian Army and troops deployed from neighboring countries. On Friday, there were clashes between rival factions of the Malian Army in Bamako, with gunfire heard echoing from a barracks of paratroopers hostile to the element that supported a military coup in March.

About 2,000 troops from neighboring countries have arrived, eventually to replace French troops. A Western military official in Bamako said, “There is a difference between them operating in a theater under French control and one where the French have disengaged.”

Nor have the militants been completely flushed out of the towns that France has claimed to have liberated. Amid concerns of violent score-settling, local officials in Gao have broadcast radio messages over the past 10 days asking for the citizens to report suspects to state authorities rather than take matters into their own hands. Community leaders, including local chiefs, youth groups and imams, have held meetings to discourage acts of vengeance. In one episode on Jan. 26, a crowd encircled an already bloodied militant whose comrades had recently abandoned Gao, recalled Dani Sidi Touré, a resident who was one of those intent on revenge. “He said, ‘Please, for Allah’s sake, do not kill me,’ ” Mr. Touré said. “And then I took my screwdriver and stabbed him in the neck.” Others joined in the attack. “When I tried to pull the screwdriver out, the handle came off but the metal stayed inside him,” he continued. “A man with a big knife came over and chopped him on his head. He fell to the ground, and others came with pieces of wood and big stones and started beating him.”

American officials monitoring the situation from afar said that the extremists who once controlled much of northern Mali would be difficult to eliminate from the region entirely. “Realistically, probably the best you can get is containment and disruption so that Al Qaeda is no longer able to control territory,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, said in a speech in Washington last month.

The authorities are investigating numerous other suspected militants as local citizens’ patrols circulate in search of the extremists and their allies, which at one time included the Tuaregs.

Quelle: New York Times

Malian suicide bomber hits Timbuktu airport

One Malian soldier killed and six wounded in first attack since French forces helped rout Islamist groups

Reuters in Bamako
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 March 2013 11.03 GMT

A suicide car-bomber has killed a Malian soldier and wounded six others at the airport in the northern town of Timbuktu overnight, a spokesman for Mali's army said on Thursday.

It was the first suicide attack in Timbuktu since French and Malian forces chased al-Qaida-linked Islamist militants from the ancient trading town nearly two months ago.

"It happened at the Malian army checkpoint, just before the French checkpoint ... we are mopping up to see if there are any other attackers in the area," said Captain Samba Coulibaly, spokesman for Mali's army in Timbuktu.

A French military officer in Mali said French air support and troops took part in fighting overnight to repel the attack and there were no French casualties.

"There were about 30 attackers ... It took a while but the result was good," the officer said, asking not to be named. The officer did not say if any of the attackers were killed or captured.

A resident said he heard two air strikes overnight and gunfire in the early morning, but by 9am GMT fighting appeared to have stopped. French war planes flew overhead on Thursday morning, he added.

The French army spokesman Colonel Thierry Burkhard said French and Malian forces had repelled an attempt to infiltrate the airport and there were no French casualties.

The French-led offensive has pushed a mix of Islamists out of the northern towns and the remote mountain bases they had occupied, but the militants have hit back with several suicide attacks on the newly freed towns.

The French president, François Hollande, said late on Wednesday that French troops were in the final phase of operations and virtually all of Mali's territory would be freed "within days".

But the attack on Timbuktu, which had not previously seen the guerrilla-style attacks mounted in Gao and Kidal, northern Mali's two other main towns, is likely to raise concerns over plans by Paris to start withdrawing troops next month.

Mali's army remains in tatters after a coup and a string of morale-sapping defeats last year, and African troops due to replace the French lack logistics, funding and training.

Quelle: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/2...er-mali-airport

Deutsche Sanitätssoldaten ohne Schutzwesten und Waffen im Kriegsgebiet - das ist ja schlimmer als Kambodscha '92

........und ohne geschützte Sanitätsfahrzeuge . ( Unimog 2.0 to )
Wäre ein ideales Einsatzgebiet für den GTK-Boxer San-Ausführung .

Luftlanderettungszentrum

Zum LLRZ gehören weder BAT noch VwuTrspM. Die sind separat, und werden in Mali auch nicht eingesetzt. Die Mission umfasst weder taktische Sanitätsunterstützung noch Verwundetentransport, sondern lediglich die Stellung einer Sanitätsstation.

Eingeflogen wurde dementsprechend ein LLRZ le. Die beiden im Bild zu sehenden LKW 2t mit Kabine dienen zum Bewegen der dazugehörigen 70kw-SEA-Anhänger.

Bewegung für Einheit und Dschihad in Westafrika mit Strela

Ground Zero - Mali was shot in Gao, Mali, on February 21, 2013. It's basically the first legitimate combat footage to come out of the war there. Normally the French ban journalists from the frontlines and film a sanitized version of the fighting themselves and then distribute it to the media.

In this case, the insurgents came to us: they slipped into Gao overnight on small boats and used suicide bombers to blast their way into government buildings. The French left the fighting to the Malian army for most of the day as a test of their combat abilities. Malian soldiers, while very brave, are almost completely untrained and had great difficulty fighting less than a dozen jihadists, some of whom were children. They fired wild bursts of automatic fire everywhere, destroying the city center. The Malians soon ran out of ammunition and had to wait for the French to show up and save the day.

Gao, le 21 février, intervention de la QRF du GTIA2
21 février 2013, centre-ville de Gao, la QRF du GTIA 2 intervient en appui des forces armées maliennes au contact avec des groupes terroristes infiltrés dans la ville de Gao. En fin d’après-midi, la situation étant redevenue calme, la QRF, composée d’une section de VAB, de trois sections VBCI et de deux hélicoptères Gazelle, a regagné l’aéroport où elle est stationnée

[klugscheidmodus on]
Nur ein kurzer Einwurf bzgl. der Übersetzung: Einheit (im arabischen Original Tawhid) bezieht sich nicht auf eine geographische oder politsche Einheit (z.B. der Umma), sondern auf die Einzigkeit Allahs im Gegensatz zur christlichen Dreifaltigkeit, polytheistischen Religion und auch zum sogenannten "Volksislam" mit sufistischen Praktiken, Gräber- und Heiligenverehrung und Bestandteilen traditioneller afrikanischer Religionen, also im Sinne des Salafismus / Wahhabismus.
[/klugscheißmodus off]

Mit dem Christentum steht es hier ja ähnlich, z.B. gläubiger Katholik zu sein und gleichzeitig ans Sangomas und Muti zu glauben ist in Afrika kein Widerspruch, was für Europäer oft sehr schwer nachzuvollziehen ist.

Von "keiner" war nie die Rede...