* Mali increasingly compared to Somalia, Afghanistan
* AU calls for UN backing for intervention
* Will West offer airpower among future options?
By David Lewis
DAKAR, June 4 (Reuters) - When Mali's Tuareg nomads launched a rebellion in
January, many in Africa thought it would be just the latest in a long line
of desert uprisings to be swiftly placated with offers of cash and jobs.
Some optimists mused that the indigo-turbaned northerners might even take on
the local arm of al Qaeda, which was plying a disruptive trade in Western
hostages and trafficked goods.
But instead, the Tuaregs' struggle for an independent homeland has been
hijacked by better-armed Islamists from Mali and abroad, creating a safe
haven for militants in the Sahara that is already being compared to similar
bastions elsewhere.
"We are in an early stage of Afghanistan and Somalia. There is no doubt in
my mind," said Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, a Mauritanian diplomat who has been a
United Nations envoy in both west Africa and Somalia.
Mali is still a long way from the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan of the 1990s
from which Osama bin Laden's then little-known al Qaeda readied the Sept. 11
attacks on U.S. targets in 2001.
And the desert trade in hostages, narcotics and other goods has yet to reach
the scale of the piracy off the east coast of Somalia, estimated to cost the
global economy $7 billion a year.
But Ould-Abdallah and a swelling chorus of security experts point to an
influx of foreign fighters, a debilitating rivalry between neighbouring
states, and steady flow of illicit funds as making Mali and the wider
Saharan zone the next one to watch.
In former colonial power France, the new defence minister warned last week
of a "west African Afghanistan" in Mali.
The rebels' seizure of three major airstrips in the north - near the towns
of Gao, Timbuktu and Tessalit - means that, in the absence of a functioning
Malian air force, they can ferry in everything from drugs and weapons to yet
more foreign fighters.
While some believe the threat can be contained within the area, others think
it will stretch further afield. Among the latter is the African Union, whose
chairman last week called for the United Nations to back a regional force to
intervene.
"All the way across Europe, there is growing concern," one Western diplomat
working in the region told Reuters.
"We have to recognise that it cannot be contained in northern Mali or even
west Africa."
"COOL PLACE FOR JIHADIS"
The Sahara, and the Sahel scrubland which skirts it to the south, had
already been inching up the global security agenda in recent years as Al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a franchise of the militant network, became
more active in the zone after a crackdown by authorities in Algeria, where
AQIM has its roots.
The overspill of arms and fighters from last year's Libyan war into an
already fragile neighbourhood added a new layer of insecurity even before
the rebellion in northern Mali.
When Malian government troops were routed in early April, a variety of
groups entered the fray, in many cases appearing openly in the main towns
for the first time. They included men declaring loyalty to al Qaeda and to
AQIM splinter groups like the little-known MUJWA, as well as some members of
Nigeria's Islamist militant organisation Boko Haram.
"It has become a cool place for jihadis from the region," said one U.S.
official with knowledge of the situation, adding that gunmen were also
coming in to northern Mali from Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania.
Early developments in the rebellion focused on the secular National Movement
for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), whose slick, European-based PR machine
and Tuareg sympathisers hailed a series of small victories notched up
against the army as they sought to carve a state they call Azawad out of the
desert.
But the complex nature of the uprising emerged after a coup on March 22 in
the Malian capital Bamako, far to the south, by soldiers angry at the
government's failure to contain the revolt. Their coup, however, merely
emboldened the rebels to make a lightning advance.
As rebel forces took major towns such as the ancient city of Timbuktu, it
became clear that MNLA fighters were operating alongside a newly formed
Islamist movement known as Ansar Dine, whose stated goal is to impose
Islamic law, sharia, across Mali.
Ansar Dine is run by Iyad Ag Ghali - described in a leaked U.S. diplomatic
cable from as "northern Mali's undisputed power broker". In two decades
navigating northern Mali's tribal and political circles, Ag Ghali led two
previous Tuareg rebellions, had a stint as a diplomat in Saudi Arabia and,
once back home, acted as an go-between in hostage bargains with al Qaeda
cells.
Diplomats in Mali said Ag Ghali formed Ansar Dine, commonly translated as
Defenders of Faith, last year after being rebuffed in separate efforts to
head both the MNLA and his Ifoghas Tuareg clan: "He lost the tribal line. He
lost the rebellion. What does he have left? Religion," said a diplomat based
in Bamako.
POWER-SHARING DEAL
Alongside the MNLA, Ansar Dine has jointly controlled Mali's north for two
months. It was initially welcomed by local people for restoring a semblance
of order after three months of violence and disruption. But it is now facing
increasing hostility to its efforts to impose sharia on populations with a
long history of practising a more liberal style of Islam.
Girls and boys have been separated in schools. Residents have been whipped
for drinking alcohol and smoking and hundreds took to the streets of the
town of Gao to protest last month when Islamists there banned soccer and
television.
Yet if imposing sharia has won Ag Ghali little popularity, it has been
crucial in drawing him closer to AQIM, a group with which he was already
familiar - literally, through family connections - and which he now needed
for its firepower and the cash it had accumulated after years operating in
the area.
Such has been the rapprochement that Ag Ghali is now understood to have an
al Qaeda nom de guerre - Abu Fadhil.
"(Ag Ghali) is using religion, but his aim is political," said Mohamed
Coulibaly of the Dawa movement, which preaches the same conservative form of
Islam as that espoused by Ag Ghali but which rejects violence.
Ansar Dine and AQIM each number around 500 fighters, giving them a combined
headcount roughly equal to that of the MNLA and substantial clout in an area
the size of Spain with a population of little over a million.
Witnesses say the Islamists are better-resourced and more heavily armed than
the Tuareg separatists, however, allowing them to shunt the MNLA aside and
take effective control on their own of towns across northern Mali.
The government in the south is labouring with a fragile transition back to
civilian rule after the March 22 coup and its army is still licking its
wounds after the rebel advance, so Bamako is in no position to take back the
north any time soon.
While the government rejects the MNLA's secession, there might have been
scope for negotiations on easing poverty in the north that could have
provided a platform for resolving the rift in the country. But the
marginalisation of the secular MNLA by the Islamists makes even that degree
of dialogue impossible.
The MNLA now appears to risk tearing itself apart over a proposed
power-sharing deal in the north with Ansar Dine - with the latter saying
sharia is a non-negotiable part of the deal even as it consolidates its
positions on the ground.
FUMBLING DIPLOMACY
Prospects of a solution from outside are equally dim.
Niger, whose capital Niamey is closer to much of the rebel-run zone even
than Bamako, is pushing for quick military action to crush the rebels. Yet
Algeria, the region's biggest military power, seeks dialogue and is prickly
about any suggestion of foreign forces operating in the Sahara.
Such divisions are not new. Sour ties between Algeria and Morocco and
longstanding regional frustration with Mali for its perceived laxity in
dealing with the security threat on its territory, have hamstrung Western
efforts to coordinate a response to the growing AQIM menace to Western
interests.
On May 11, in a closed-door U.N. Security Council debate, diplomacy gave way
to criticism of the west African states' ECOWAS grouping. According to a
U.N. report seen by Reuters, Germany and the United States urged the United
Nations to play a bigger role - a move openly supported last week by the
region's main former colonial power, France, and by the African Union.
But if calls are growing for U.N.-backed intervention, memories of the
disastrous 1993 U.S. foray into Somalia and the difficulties of NATO's
decade-old presence in Afghanistan have dampened appetites for putting
Western troops on the ground.
While Paris has military bases in Senegal and Ivory Coast together with
special forces deployed to the region, France and Washington are so far only
ready to provide support roles to an potential African mission to suppress
the revolt.
ECOWAS has said for weeks that it has a standby force of thousands ready to
deploy to Mali but the mission is short of any clear planning and mandate.
It is meant to be invited in by authorities in Bamako but wrangling there
between politicians and soldiers who led the coup has blocked any coherent
policy.
There are questions, too, over the effectiveness of a west African force,
over the cost, put by one peacekeeping source at over $200 million, and on
whether foreign troops might just further poison relations among Mali's
rival groups.
Others suggest it is still not too late to use deep-running tribal ties to
detach the MNLA separatists, and some Tuaregs who have joined Ansar Dine,
from hardline and foreign Islamists in the hope of starting negotiations
with those more ready to talk.
"If a force goes in now, before there have been any talks, it risks pushing
the moderates towards the extremists," the Western diplomat in the region
said.
However, Todd Moss, once a senior U.S. diplomat working on Africa and now
vice-president at the Center for Global Development, said a protracted
stalemate would make a military effort more likely - possibly relying
primarily on Western air power rather than a regional force moving in on the
ground.
"Not ECOWAS ... rather a French and US counter-terrorism campaign from the
sky," Moss suggested. "Western policymakers will absolutely not allow a
jihadist safe haven." (Editing by Mark John and Alastair Macdonald)
C Thomson Reuters 2012 All rights reserved
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Received on Mon Jun 04 2012 - 17:50:06 EDT
