30 French Warplanes Blast Islamist Targets in Mali
إقرأ هذا الخبر بالعربية
Thirty French warplanes on Sunday blasted Islamic extremist training and logistics centers in northeast Mali, just hours after President Francois Hollande visited the country, the military said.
Fighter jets, refueling and reconnaissance planes took part in the "major" overnight operation in the Tessalit area north of Kidal, military spokesman Colonel Thierry Burkhard told AFP.
Kidal is the last bastion of radicals who occupied the desert north for months before France's surprise intervention.
Tessalit, near the border with Algeria, is believed to be where seven French nationals captured by Islamists are being held.
Hollande received a rapturous welcome in Mali on Saturday as he promised that France would stay as long as necessary to continue the fight against Islamist rebels.
He told Malians it was time for Africans to take the lead but that France would not abandon them.
Malian Foreign Minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly said he hoped the French military operation in his country would continue.
"Faced with these hardened fighters whose arsenal must be destroyed, we hope that the mission will continue," he told France's Journal du Dimanche newspaper, adding that the "aerial dimension" of the campaign was particularly important.
04 February 2013, 00:23
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This cannot be compared. France in helping the African Union. It's a weird relationship but apperently it's a win-win for the Malians and the French. Still, they behave like neocolonialists because of their financial interests. But that's what relationships are all about, it's universal. There has to be several beneficinaries or else it doesn't work.
good night
03 February 2013, 17:45
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The main financier of salafist Islam come from oil rich Wahhabi Arabia. Not necessarily from the governments but from influential local leaders challenging their western allied goverenment and rooting their actions in the bloody history of Islam.
03 February 2013, 17:46
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In Lebanon they are becoming influential especially in the north. Our action less government is doing nothing to root them out unlike what was done at nahr el bared.
03 February 2013, 18:36
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Look at how AFP talks about the French president: "rapturous" reception. It does not mention the military coup that happened in Mali last year. And yet that coup installed a military that could not fight. Wikipedia says in fact there was a second military coup on top of the first one, apparently leaving a Captain Sanogo, the democratically elected government long gone, international condemnations, and yet here is France rescuing liberty for the long haul.
03 February 2013, 23:44
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Greatpierro - please spare us your islamaphobia. Do you reallky think the history of christianity is less bloody? Unfortunatelly, human history is steeped in blood.
