Free Republic

Everything about Mami exudes exhaustion. Her round brown eyes are pools of sadness, and her bulbous body throbs with pain. "First, armed groups attacked nearby," she explains in a tired voice as we sit on plastic matting, five young children nestled close to their mother in Mali's fabled city in the sand Timbuktu. "Then the rains came, and did the rest." The worst rains in 50 years in northern Mali washed away their entire crop. Those rains poured through the cracks in her mud home caused by an explosion an armed group set off. The cracks are showing everywhere in...

On July 26, 2019, by Executive Order 13882, the President declared a national emergency pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-1706) to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States constituted by the situation in Mali.The situation in Mali, including repeated violations of ceasefire arrangements made pursuant to the 2015 Agreement on Peace and Reconciliation in Mali; the expansion of terrorist activities into southern and central Mali; the intensification of drug trafficking and trafficking in persons, human rights abuses, and hostage-taking; and the intensification of...

  TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES:Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)) provides for the automatic termination of a national emergency unless, within 90 days before the anniversary date of its declaration, the President publishes in the Federal Registerand transmits to the Congress a notice stating that the emergency is to continue in effect beyond the anniversary date. In accordance with this provision, I have sent to the Federal Register for publication the enclosed notice stating that the national emergency declared with respect to the situation in Mali in Executive Order 13882 of July 26,...

BAMAKO (Reuters) - Mali will increase the size of its army by about 50% in a recruitment drive this year aimed at uprooting jihadist groups, Prime Minister Boubou Cisse said on Wednesday. The plan is to hire 10,000 new soldiers in the coming months to “allow our armed and security forces to be much more present in quantity and I hope in quality in areas where they were not,” Cisse said. He did not say how much the increase would cost or how the arid West African country would pay for it when military costs already take up a significant...

UN demands that British army send more women for defense against jihad in Mali DEC 25, 2019 11:00 AM BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS “The United Nations has placed strict gender quotas on a British Army peacekeeping deployment to Mali in west Africa, demanding more females are sent under the auspices of a special bureaucratic directive….The call for more female UK soldiers to be included is part of a wider set of directives drafted by the U.N. that mandates strict quotas for female personnel in the name of equal opportunity.” The UN is forcing the issue of more women in the British...

An investigation has begun into how the two helicopters hit each other. Thousands of French troops have been deployed in Mali since 2013 after militants overran parts of the north. Mali's army has since recaptured the territory but insecurity continues and the violence has spread to neighbouring countries. France now has 4,500 troops deployed to support the forces of Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad against the jihadists. French Defence Minister Florence Parly vowed that her country would not turn its back on the fight against terrorism after the deadly collision. It happened in darkness around 19:40 local time...

New Explosion Reported in Mali, At Least Two Servicemen Killed Sputnik News 15:41 03.11.2019(updated 17:59 03.11.2019) The day before, the Elysee Palace said in a statement that a French soldier was killed that day in the morning in Mali as an explosive device detonated near his armoured vehicle. Two Malian soldiers were killed and six more injured as a result of a blast of an improvised explosive device in the central part of the country, the national Armed Forces said on Sunday in a statement. "On Saturday, November 2, 2019, during the patrol mission, a vehicle of the Malian Armed...

Gunmen surrounded the village before attacking people in their homes in Ogossagou in the country's Mopti region, a local official said. The attack on Saturday targeted members of the Fulani ethnic community. Ambassadors for the UN are currently in Mali addressing the increasing levels of ethnic and jihadist violence. The victims of Saturday's deadly attack were "killed with guns and machetes", a local security official told AFP news agency. Unconfirmed reports put the death toll far higher.

A militia in Mali says it has recovered weapons and a vehicle abandoned by US special forces during a deadly ambush in Niger last year, and is prepared to return them to the Americans. The Tuareg rebel group says it seized the battered four-wheel-drive and two rifles during clashes with "bandits" on the Mali-Niger border. Four members of the US special forces were killed in last year's raid. An offshoot of the Islamic State (IS) group said it carried out the attack. In a statement, the MSA-GATIA militia group said it captured the materiel from unidentified "armed bandits" on the...

Mozambique: Islamic State captures key port, establishes its first outpost in southern Africa, imposes Sharia AUG 19, 2020 3:00 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER The desire to restore the caliphate is not discarded after setbacks. The service of Allah is not negated by setbacks. The jihad continues, and will continue, while the world yawns and tends to other matters. “Islamic State now has its first outpost in southern Africa after capture of key port in Mozambique,” by Julian Kossoff, Business Insider, August 17, 2020: Mozambique has become the latest African stronghold of Islamic State (IS) after well-armed insurgents captured a strategic...

A contractor who was working at a Florida airport opened up a container to find a live missile. The shocking find happened on Friday afternoon at Lakeland Linder International Airport east of Tampa. It's not known how the missile arrived at the airport which is mainly used for private jets and no longer for any kind of military use.

Issued on: 19/08/2020 - 02:25 Mali President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita resigned on Tuesday and dissolved parliament hours after mutinying soldiers detained him at gunpoint, plunging a country already facing a jihadist insurgency

Turkey and Qatar have reiterated their support for Libya's internationally recognised government during a trip by their defence chiefs to the capital, Tripoli, where Germany's foreign minister also paid an unexpected visit... The country has been split since 2014 between factions based in the east and west, and regional powers have aligned themselves with the competing sides. While Turkey and its regional ally Qatar support the GNA, forces in the east led by renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar have received backing from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia. "We believe that we will achieve the wanted results by supporting...

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and Prime Minister Boubou Cisse have been detained by mutinying soldiers in the capital during an apparent coup attempt. The development on Tuesday came hours after soldiers took up arms and staged a mutiny at a key base in Kati, a town close to Bamako. It followed a weeks-long political crisis that has seen opposition protesters taking to the streets to demand the departure of Keita, accusing him of allowing the country's economy to collapse and mishandling a worsening security situation. Mali's years-long conflict, in which ideologically-motivated armed groups have stoked ethnic tensions while jockeying...

President Donald Trump should appoint a special envoy for Nigeria and the Lake Chad region to “focus like a laser beam” on the attacks by Boko Haram and other Islamic militants, according to one of the main architects of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Former Congressman Frank Wolf said such a move was necessary to stop a genocide of Christians in the region. Wolf was speaking to journalists during a press call on the situation in Nigeria sponsored by In Defense of Christians, a Washington D.C. human rights group. Nigeria has had over 50,000 people killed since 2009...

France said on Friday its military forces had killed al Qaeda's North Africa chief Abdelmalek Droukdel, a key Islamist fighter that its forces had been hunting for more than seven years, during an operation in Mali. "On June 3, French army forces, with the support of their local partners, killed the emir of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Abdelmalek Droukdel, and several of his closest collaborators, during an operation in northern Mali," French Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly wrote on Twitter. The announcement of the death of Droukdel comes almost six months after former colonial power France and regional...

Riyad Dirar, the co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF, stressed that they are among those who are inviting but not invited to the Third Cairo Conference, because they are from the preparatory committee of it. He stressed Egypt's important role in the political solution in Syria and that it supports their position in facing "Turkish aggression" in the region. Dirar said in a statement to North-Press, that the Syrian Democratic Council is included in the preparatory committee for "Cairo 3" conference, and they are seeking to develop the road map...

Military strongman Khalifa Haftar's reluctance to sign up to a Turkish-Russian orchestrated ceasefire accord underlines the complexity of Libya's conflict and pressures exerted by key foreign players, analysts say. He left Moscow on Tuesday without signing a permanent truce aimed at ending nine months of fighting against the UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) led by Fayez al-Sarraj. His abrupt departure was a setback for an international diplomatic push, after Sarraj had signed up to halting Haftar's offensive to seize Tripoli from the GNA. For Emad Badi of the Washington-based Middle East Institute, there are two plausible explanations for Haftar...

FBI agents have found evidence that Chattanooga shooter Mohammod Abdulazeez was following a radical American member of al Qaeda online in 2013, as well as pages of writing that showed the young man was suicidal and looking for a way to absolve what he considered were his sins, according to a representative of Abdulazeez's family. Video tapes of Anwar al-Awlaki, the high-profile American al Qaeda cleric and recruiter, have circulated on the internet and have been popular in jihadist circles long after al-Awlaki's death by American drone strike in September 2011. ....there is no evidence so far that Mohammod Abdulazeez,...

Despite putting Africa at the bottom of his foreign policy priorities, US President Donald Trump remains widely popular on the continent Every year, a leader of public opinion polls, Gallup Poll asks the world to judge America’s foreign policy. In 135 countries, they ask, “Do you agree or disagree with the way the United States is exercising its leadership?” Most reacted poorly to US President Donald Trump taking over the 76 square metre Oval Office. The global approval rating for US foreign policy stands at 31% — 3% points below China, and on a par with Russia. This has never...