France and several of its Western allies said Thursday that they
would begin a “coordinated withdrawal” of military forces from Mali, capping
months of an increasingly bitter breakdown in relations with the country’s
ruling junta and throwing into uncertainty regional anti-terrorism operations
spearheaded by French armed forces.
اضافة اعلان
Jihadi groups have spread across
Mali, in West Africa, and to
the country’s neighbors, even as a coalition of Western and African militaries
has tried to fight them, but France, its European partners and Canada have
nevertheless “taken the decision to withdraw their military presence in Mali,”
the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Thursday.
The accelerated pullout, a far quicker and bumpier withdrawal
than France had anticipated, could give ground to terrorist groups, which have
grown in numbers and reach over the past decade, killing thousands of civilians
and displacing millions. It also raises questions about the use of a
military-first approach in a complex crisis with deep social roots.
The withdrawal comes amid a spiraling diplomatic crisis. France
accused Mali of employing the services of a controversial Russian paramilitary
company, the Wagner group, and railed against the junta that came to power in
2020, saying it was “out of control.” Mali, which denies hosting Russian mercenaries,
accused France of abandoning it in the fight against jihadis, and expelled the
French ambassador.
Finally, France pulled the plug, accusing Mali of obstructing
its operations.
At a news conference, Macron expressed frustration with the
Malian junta and said that the breakdown in relations had prompted France and
its allies to rethink their strategy and reorganize their forces.
France sent troops into Mali, a landlocked former French colony,
in 2013 to beat back armed Islamists who had taken over its northern cities.
Mali, which has longstanding ties to France and a large immigrant population
there, had requested the intervention.
But after successfully routing extremists from the cities,
France decided to stay on, and the scope of its mission mushroomed. Over 4,000
French soldiers are currently deployed across the Sahel, a wide strip of land
that cuts across Africa just below the Sahara. Most of them are in Mali, where
there is also a 15,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force.
“We cannot remain militarily engaged with de facto authorities
whose strategy and hidden objectives we do not share,” Macron said at the news
conference, which came after a dinner Wednesday evening with the French leader
and Western and African counterparts, and ahead of a summit between European
Union and African Union leaders in Brussels.
France’s hasty retreat will likely be hailed as a major victory
by the jihadi groups: the withdrawal of foreign forces is one of its two main
demands, along with a transformation of society and politics in line with a
particular interpretation of Shariah law.
But it could also be welcomed by the junta, which has
capitalized on growing anti-France sentiment by the Malian public, which holds
France partly responsible for worsening security and corruption among the
political elites that the military overthrew.
“They may be saying that they’re choosing to leave, but really
from the Malian perspective, they’re being kicked out,” said Hannah Armstrong,
an independent analyst focused on the Sahel region.
Macron said that three military bases in Mali would be shuttered
over the next four to six months, in coordination with Malian forces.
While he said that France and its allies were still discussing
how their forces would be redeployed, he suggested that there would be a pivot
to neighboring Niger and a bigger focus on countries in the Gulf of Guinea, as
well as on programs to help civilian populations before military operations
become necessary.
“The expectations of our partners have changed,” Macron said.
“The sensibility of public opinion in countries of the region has also
changed.”
Amadou Albert Maïga, the parliamentary secretary for Mali’s
National Transition Council — a temporary legislative body set up by the junta
— said the withdrawal announcement was “predictable given the diplomatic
tensions between our two countries,” amid a growing feeling among the
population that France wanted to interfere in Malian affairs.
“We exchanged with France, a brethren country, but unfortunately
French authorities did not understand,” he said.
Beginning in Mali in 2012, terrorist groups across the Sahel
took up arms against their governments, taking advantage of existing grievances
held by marginalized communities, recruiting young men with few prospects and
cowing villages in rural areas into submission.
Groups in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso attack armies who are ill
trained or poorly equipped to maintain security in the vast tracts of land that
comprise the sand-swept region, and whose own abuses often make things worse.
The jihadis also attack civilians; massacres have become a regular occurrence.
When France sent troops into Mali, the soldiers received an
ecstatic welcome. Their campaign was supposed to last only a few weeks.
Nearly 10 years later, thousands of French soldiers are still
there, housed in sprawling air-conditioned bases, operating aircraft including
drones, and traversing the scrub in state-of-the-art armored cars. They are
searching for insurgent groups armed with assault rifles and moving on
motorcycles whose members have proved stubbornly elusive despite the stream of
jihadi leaders that France reports it has killed.
The military coalition, led by France and Mali but including
other West African and European armies, too, had long been failing to stem the
tide, and worsening security was one of the factors that led to Mali’s coup in
August 2020. As its counterterrorism mission in the Sahel, Operation Barkhane,
was prolonged, the popularity of the French-led intervention plummeted.
“Ten years into this crisis, it’s pretty clear that everybody’s
Sahel strategy has failed lamentably,” said Ornella Moderan, the head of the
Sahel Program of the Institute for Security Studies.
France announced in June that it would begin to draw down its
troops fighting under Barkhane, which receives operational support from the
United States.
But even as Barkhane wound down, a European task force
spearheaded by the French, called Takuba, prepared to begin. Takuba brought
together Special Forces from several European nations to take part in the fight
against jihadis in the region — a burden that Macron had been keen to share
with Western allies as French public opinion increasingly questioned France’s
purpose in the region.
Now even Takuba’s future is uncertain: Macron said that some of
that operation’s forces would be repositioned in Niger, but under what name or
with what mandate was unclear.
The Western countries said in a statement that they remained
“committed to supporting Mali and its people in their efforts to achieve
sustainable peace and stability” but that the country’s new leaders were
responsible for “multiple obstructions” and that the current conditions meant
that they could no longer contribute to the fight against terrorism there.
The statement added that the countries would continue their
coordinated action against terrorism in the broader region, with new terms to
be established by June.
In light of the withdrawal, it appeared that Mali’s military
partnerships would now shrink to those with other African countries and with
Russia.
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