As Troops Advance in Mali, U.S. Begins Airlift
By LYDIA POLGREEN, PETER TINTI and ALAN COWELL
Marco Gualazzini for The New York Times
Marco Gualazzini for The New York Times
A man inspected the charred
remains of vehicles used by Islamist militants in Diabaly, about 275
miles from the Malian capital, Bamako, after a weeklong occupation came
to an end.
By LYDIA POLGREEN, PETER TINTI and ALAN COWELL
SÉGOU, Mali — Malian and French forces were reported to be in control of
two important central Malian towns on Tuesday after the French Defense
Ministry said they recaptured them on Monday, pushing back an advance by
Islamist militants who have overrun the country’s northern half.
Multimedia
Related
-
French Strikes in Mali Supplant Caution of U.S. (January 14, 2013)
-
Malian Rebels Take Town and Vow to Avenge French Attack (January 15, 2013)
-
Africa Must Take Lead in Mali, France Says (January 20, 2013)
At the same time, the United States military said on Tuesday that it had
begun airlifting French troops and equipment from a base in southern
France to Bamako, the capital of Mali, aboard giant C-17 transport
planes.
Two flights arrived on Monday and a third on Tuesday, and the airlift
will continue for the next several days, Tom Saunders, a spokesman for
the United States Africa Command, said in a telephone interview from the
command’s headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, the defense minister of France, hailed the
French-Malian advance on Monday as “a clear military success for the
government in Bamako and for French forces intervening in support of
these operations.”
The developments in the two central towns — Diabaly, about 275 miles
north of Bamako, and Douentza, on the eastern bank of the Niger River,
300 miles northeast of the Malian capital — represented a reassertion of
government control in areas where a lightning strike by Islamist forces
earlier this month prompted France to intervene, initially with
airstrikes, to halt the rebel advance.
French soldiers in armored vehicles, part of what the military command
in Paris has labeled Operation Serval, rolled through the town of
Diabaly on Monday to cheers from residents, who flew French and Malian
flags to welcome them.
“I want to thank the French people,” said Mamadou Traoré, a Diabaly
resident. He said French airstrikes had chased away the militants
without harming any civilians, a claim echoed by other residents.
“None of us were touched,” Mr. Traoré said. “It was incredible.”
In Douentza, The Associated Press quoted a Malian official, Sali Maiga,
as saying Islamist forces had already retreated from the settlement when
French and Malian troops arrived on Monday.
After imposing an overnight curfew, “the Malian military and the French
Army spent their first night, and the people are very happy,” the
official said Tuesday, and there have been no reports of incidents or
gunfire.
The advances by government and French troops left them deployed along
the main access routes to the desert redoubts of the Islamist fighters
farther north in settlements like Timbuktu and Gao.
Interviewed by the French radio station RFI, Gen. Ibrahima Dahirou
Dembele, the Malian Army chief of staff, said his forces were seeking
“the total liberation of northern Mali.”
“If the support remains consistent, it won’t take more than a month to
free Gao and Timbuktu,” he said, northern cities that have been occupied
by the Islamists since early 2012. France has listed the restoration of
central government authority across Mali as one of its aims in the
campaign.
Agence France-Presse quoted French military officials on Tuesday as
saying French warplanes had attacked Islamist command centers near
Timbuktu in airstrikes over the past 48 hours. France has said it is
aiming to send 2,500 soldiers to Mali, and 2,150 have been deployed so
far.
Neighboring Chad has said it will send 2,000 soldiers to join West
African forces assembling in support of government and French troops in
Mali.
Islamist fighters overran Diabaly a week ago, the closest they have come
to Bamako in an aggressive surge this month. Worried that there was
little to stop them from rolling into the capital, where many French
citizens live, France quickly stepped into the fight, striking the
militants at the front lines and bombing their strongholds in the north.
Suddenly, a long-simmering standoff with the Islamist groups holding the
north had been transformed into a war involving French forces,
precisely the kind of event the West hoped to avoid. American officials
have long warned that Western involvement could stir anti-Western
sentiment and provoke terrorist attacks, a fear that seemed to be
realized when militants stormed a gas facility in Algeria last week,
resulting in the deaths of at least 37 foreign hostages.
A man inspected the charred remains of vehicles used
by Islamist militants in Diabaly, about 275 miles from the Malian
capital, Bamako, after a weeklong occupation came to an end.
Malian and French forces were reported in control of two important towns
on Tuesday as the United States military said it had begun airlifting
French troops and equipment to Mali’s capital.
Even after French forces entered the fight in Mali, driving back the
Islamists proved more difficult than officials initially suggested.
Rather than flee, many of the militants in Diabaly seemed to dig in,
taking over homes and putting the civilian population in the cross-fire.
Multimedia
Related
-
French Strikes in Mali Supplant Caution of U.S. (January 14, 2013)
-
Malian Rebels Take Town and Vow to Avenge French Attack (January 15, 2013)
-
Africa Must Take Lead in Mali, France Says (January 20, 2013)
But they eventually fled on Friday morning, residents said, in the face of relentless French airstrikes.
The fighters had little time to impose the version of Shariah law
that has made them infamous in the north, where they have carried out
public whippings and amputations and stoned a couple to death. But their
brief reign over Diabaly was a small taste of the harsh policies they
have enacted elsewhere.
“I had to cover my head at all times,” said one Diabaly woman, Djenaba
Cissé. “When I walked with my brother to the fields, they would bother
us. They would ask us questions to verify that we were siblings.”
Few residents said they actually met the hardened men who had taken
control of their village, but Kola Maiga, who lives at the edge of town,
recalled their arrival on the morning of Jan. 14.
“I was in my house, and I saw them coming, and I knew, I knew that war
was here in Diabaly,” Mr. Maiga said. “The first day, they started
shooting in the air. They wanted the population to know they have
power.”
He feared them, he said, but they tried to reassure him, offering cookies to his children.
“They said: ‘Do not be afraid. We are with Allah,’ ” Mr. Maiga said.
Mali has been in crisis since last January, when Tuaregs in northern
Mali began a separatist uprising, newly invigorated by an influx of
fighters and weapons from Libya after the fall of Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi.
A military coup by junior officers angry at how the government responded
to the Tuareg uprising followed in March, leaving the country in
disarray and hastening the loss of its northern half to insurgents.
Islamist groups, some with links to Al Qaeda,
quickly pushed aside the secular Tuareg militants, taking over northern
towns and imposing their strict interpretation of Shariah law.
The fighters appeared to find little support among the local population,
who said the harsh version of Islam they sought to impose had little
resemblance to the moderate faith practiced by most people here.
“These guys, they are vicious,” said Oumar Diakité, Diabaly’s mayor.
“It’s not Islam that they want. They want other things. As you can see, a
poor country like Mali, they have come to attack us.”
Residents who had fled to nearby towns returned to their homes on Monday
after hearing that the militants had been chased away.
“They arrived, and they said they were going to bring Shariah here,”
said Mohamed Tounkara, who returned on Monday. “We don’t want Shariah.
That’s why I left with my family.”
He said he was grateful to the French military but had little faith in
his own country’s army, which in the past year has let half of Mali’s
territory slip away and ended two decades of democratic rule.
“If France stays here, I trust their army,” Mr. Tounkara said. “We don’t have complete faith in our army, honestly.”
Algeria Defends Tough Response to Hostage Crisis as Toll Rises
By ADAM NOSSITER and ERIC SCHMITT
The prime minister of Algeria said that the militants behind the
kidnappings intended to kill all their captives and that the army saved
many from death by attacking.
Ramzi Boudina/Reuters
Rescue workers with the coffin of one of the slain hostages.
By ADAM NOSSITER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: January 21, 2013
ALGIERS — The prime minister of Algeria
offered an unapologetic defense on Monday of the country’s tough
actions to end the Sahara hostage crisis, saying that the militants who
had carried out the kidnappings intended to kill all their captives and
that the army saved many from death by attacking.
Multimedia
Related
-
Hostages Dead in Bloody Climax to Siege in Algeria (January 20, 2013)
-
Africa Must Take Lead in Mali, France Says (January 21, 2013)
-
News Analysis: North Africa Is a New Test (January 21, 2013)
Sidali Djarboub/Associated Press
Algeria’s prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, spoke at
a news conference on Monday about the assault on hostage-takers.
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
But the assertion came as the death toll of foreign hostages rose
sharply, to 37, and as American officials said they had offered
sophisticated surveillance help that could minimize casualties, both
before and during the military operation to retake a seized gas field
complex in the Algerian desert.
At least some of the assistance was accepted, they said, but there were
still questions about whether Algeria had taken all available steps to
avert such a bloody outcome.
American counterterrorism officials and experts said they would have
taken a more cautious approach, using detailed surveillance to gain an
information advantage and hopefully outmaneuver the militants. But
others declined to second-guess the Algerians, saying events had
unfolded so rapidly that the government might have felt it had no choice
but to kill the kidnappers, even if hostages died in the process.
The debate over how the Algerians handled one of the worst
hostage-taking episodes in recent memory reflects conflicting ideas over
how to manage such mass abductions in an age of suicidal terrorist acts
in a post-9/11 world.
The Algerians — and some Western supporters — argue that the loss of
innocent lives is unavoidable when confronting fanatics who will kill
their captives anyway, while others say modern technology provides some
means of minimizing the deaths.
At a news conference in Algiers, the prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal,
portrayed the military’s deadly assaults on the Islamist militants who
had stormed and occupied an internationally run gas-producing complex
last Wednesday in remote eastern Algeria as a matter of national
character and pride.
“The whole world has understood that the reaction was courageous,” Mr.
Sellal said, calling the abductions an attack “on the stability of
Algeria.”
“Algerians are not people who sell themselves out,” he said. “When the
security of the country is at stake, there is no possible discussion.”
It was the Algerian government’s first detailed public explanation of
its actions during the siege, a brazen militant assault that has raised
broad new concerns about the strength of extremists who have carved out
enclaves in neighboring Mali and elsewhere in North Africa.
Mr. Sellal said that the 37 foreign workers killed during the episode — a
toll much higher than the 23 previously estimated — came from eight
countries and that five captives remained unaccounted for. It was
unclear how many had died at the hands of the kidnappers or the Algerian
Army. The United States said that three Americans were among the dead
and that seven had survived.
The prime minister also said that 29 kidnappers had been killed,
including the leader, and that three had been captured alive. The
militants were from Egypt, Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Tunisia and Canada,
he said — an assertion the Canadian government said it was
investigating. Mr. Sellal said the group began the plot in Mali and
entered Algeria through Libya, close to the site.
Other countries, notably Japan
and Britain, have raised concerns about what they considered Algeria’s
harsh and hasty response. The United States has not publicly criticized
Algeria, which it regards as an ally in the fight to contain jihadist
groups in Africa. But law enforcement and military officials said Monday
that they almost certainly would have handled such a crisis
differently.
First, the United States would have engaged in longer discussions with
the captors to identify the leaders and buy time, the officials said. In
the meantime, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and possibly allied security
services could have moved surveillance drones, high-altitude
reconnaissance aircraft and electronic eavesdropping equipment into
place to help identify the locations of the hostages and the assailants.
“It would have been a precision approach as opposed to a sledgehammer
approach,” said Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney, a retired deputy commander of
the United States military’s Special Operations Command.
A senior American official said the Algerians had allowed an unarmed
American surveillance drone to fly over the gas field on Thursday. But
it was unclear what role, if any, it had played in the Algerian Army’s
assault that day. American officials said they had not been told of the
strike in advance.
Prime Minister Sellal conceded no mistakes as he provided the
government’s first distinct timeline in the sequence of events, breaking
it down into three episodes.
First, the militants attacked a guarded bus carrying foreign plant
workers to the airport at In Amenas, and two people aboard were killed.
“They wanted to take control of this bus and take the foreign workers
directly to northern Mali so they could have hostages, to negotiate with
foreign countries,” he said. “But when they opened fire on the bus,
there was a strong response from the gendarmes guarding it.”
After they failed to capture the bus, the prime minister said, the
militants split into two groups: one to seize the complex’s living
quarters, the other to capture the gas plant itself, a maze of pipes and
machinery. They invaded both sections, taking dozens of hostages,
attaching bombs to some and booby-trapping the plant.
At this point, he said, the facility was ringed by security forces.
Perhaps late Wednesday or early Thursday morning — Mr. Sellal described
it as a nighttime episode — the kidnappers attempted a breakout. “They
put explosives on the hostages. They wanted to put the hostages in
four-wheel-drive vehicles and take them to Mali.”
Mr. Sellal then suggested that government helicopters immobilized the
kidnappers. Witnesses have described an intense army assault, resulting
in both militant and hostage deaths.
“A great number of workers were put in the cars; they wanted to use them
as human shields,” the prime minister said. “There was a strong
response from the army, and three cars exploded,” he said. One contained
an Algerian militant whom the prime minister identified as the leader,
Mohamed-Lamine Bouchneb.
The second and final operation happened Saturday, Mr. Sellal said, when
the 11 remaining kidnappers moved into the gas-producing part of the
complex, a hazardous area that he said they had already tried to ignite.
“The aim of the terrorists was to explode the gas compound,” he said. In
this second assault, he said, there were “a great number of hostages,”
and the kidnappers were ordered to kill them all. It was then, he said,
that army snipers killed the kidnappers.
None of the Algerian reporters questioned the prime minister’s version
of events, and some spoke of a disconnect between foreign complaints
about the way Algeria had managed the crisis and Algeria’s protracted
struggle with Islamic militancy over the past three decades.
“The terrorists came with a precise plan: Kidnap foreigners and destroy
the gas plant,” said Hamid Guemache, a journalist at TSA-Tout sur
l’Algérie, an online news site, dismissing criticism of the government.
“Did it really have a choice? If the assault hadn’t been undertaken
quickly, maybe the terrorists would have succeeded in killing all the
hostages, and blowing up the factory.”
Some American counterterrorism officials conceded that point.
“If the terrorists were shooting hostages or at least putting explosives
around their necks and their intent was to sabotage the plant, this
might have been a suicide mission to blow up the plant, and not
negotiate,” said Henry A. Crumpton, a retired career C.I.A. officer and
formerly the State Department’s top counterterrorism official.
“It sounds horrible to say, but given the number of hostages and scope
of this, this is not as bad an outcome as what could have happened, if
that was their intent.”
In all, 790 workers were on the site — including 134 foreigners of 26
nationalities — when it was first seized, the prime minister said.
From the start of the siege, the Algerians were bound to respond with
force, said Mansouria Mokhefi, a professor who heads the Middle East and
Maghreb program at the French Institute for International Relations in
Paris. The question, she said, was how bloody the outcome would be.
“Everyone knows the Algerians do not negotiate,” Dr. Mokhefi said, and surely the attackers knew this as well.
After all, she said, the foundation of the Algerian government is its
longstanding defeat of Islamist militancy and its restoration of a
“certain peace” to the country after the civil war during the 1990s,
when tens of thousands died.
“The legitimacy of this government in Algeria is its fight against
terrorism and the security of the country,” Dr. Mokhefi said.
Criticizing the Algerians for their harsh tactics, as the British and
Japanese have done, simply shows “a deep lack of knowledge about this
regime, of its functioning,” she said.
But the French understand the Algerians, Dr. Mokhefi said.
French officials have publicly supported Algeria’s actions, in part
because France needs to use Algerian airspace for its military
intervention in Mali and wants Algeria to work harder to seal its
borders with Mali.
“There isn’t a military unit that would have done better, given the
strategic conditions, the place where this unfolded, the number of
assailants and the number of hostages,” said Christian Prouteau, who was
chief of security under President François Mitterrand. “I challenge any
Western country confronting this kind of operation to do better.”
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário