mustang19 posted:France and Mali set aside colonial past to fight new common foe
PM: anti-terror fight in north Africa may last years
Ironicwarcriminal posted:mustang19 posted:France and Mali set aside colonial past to fight new common foe
PM: anti-terror fight in north Africa may last years
i like mine better
getfiscal posted:i think you guys might have your facts wrong. france has a socialist president now, he wouldn't do anything imperialist.
The president of Mali isn't socialist or even center left in any meaningful way. Al Qaeda's economic policy, if it has one, is to kick out the sleazy French kleptocrats and allow the country to go on with its business. This is one case where the islamist side has a noble aim, or at least nobler than the West, and here's hoping France falls into its own Dien Bien Black Hawk Down.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/mali/9814559/France-aims-for-total-reconquest-of-Mali.html
mustang19 posted:For now. But in the long run France is going to get bored.
They've never gotten bored of surrendering though!!!!!!
Terror in North Africa: are Westerners pulling the strings?
English-speaking jihadis seen in Mali, as a Canadian is reported to have co-ordinated Algeria attack
Canada is investigating an allegation by the Algerian Prime Minister that one of its citizens co-ordinated the terror raid at the Saharan gas plant in which dozens of hostages were killed.
Westerners, including a man with blond hair and blue eyes, are believed to have been among the Islamist militants who launched last week’s attack on the Tigantourine complex near Algeria’s border with Libya.
A French jihadist, previously unknown to authorities, and two Canadians are suspected to have been involved in the hostage-taking, and reports also claim that a man with a Western accent was among the extremists who lured terrified gas workers from their rooms during the hostage crisis.
Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal told reporters that a man, judged “by his English accent” to have been Canadian, was among the 32 Islamists whose raid on the Algerian refinery prompted a global crisis. One of the Canadians, identified only as “Shaddad”, is alleged to have played a leading role in the attack which left 58 hostages – including 37 Westerners - dead after a four-day battle with Algerian forces. Five further Western workers are still unaccounted for. “A Canadian was among the militants,” Mr Sellal said. “He was co-ordinating the attack.”
The militant group also included men from Tunisia, Egypt, Mauritania and Niger, Mr Sellal said. At least 29 Islamists from eight nationalities were killed in the operation to end the siege, with the remaining three captured alive. The make up of the attacking group – an al-Qa’ida splinter brigade who call themselves “Those Who Signed in Blood” - will be carefully examined as security experts try to assess the scale of the terror threat across North and West Africa.
Concern at the international composition of the Algerian kidnap brigade will be compounded by reports from residents in Diabaly, Mali, that Islamists who overran the town last week contained English-speakers and militants of European appearance. Speaking to The Independent yesterday after French and Malian forces had retaken the town, student Amadu Dumbia said: “I definitely heard them and there’s no chance that I made a mistake with another language. They spoke like they were from England, but had darker skins.”
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the leader of the group who is suspected of masterminding the gas plant attack from outside Algeria, yesterday warned that there would be more attacks on those participating in the military campaign in neighbouring Mali. In a statement to a radio station in Mauritania, which received regular communications from the militants during the In Amenas plant siege, the Algerian-born militant said: “We warn all the states who took part in the Crusader campaign against the Azwad region that if they do not retreat from their decision there will be more operations.”
He also insisted that the brigade which undertook the attack was not local, saying “only five Algerians” took part in the attack and “none of them were locals from the city”.
Prime Minister David Cameron today told the Commons that the West faced a “generational struggle” in combating the “poisonous ideology” of Islamic extremists in the Sahel. Mr Cameron said that Britain would join the manhunt for Belmokhtar and promised extra support for the French campaign in Mali. Echoing the language used by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, he said: “This is the work our generation faces and we must demonstrate the same resolve and sense of purpose as previous generations have with the challenges that they faced in this House and in this country.”
A spokeswoman for Canada’s Foreign Affairs Ministry yesterday said that they were still seeking clarity on a possible Canadian connection to the raid. “We are in close contact with Algerian authorities, but nothing [has been] confirmed yet,” Chrystiane Roy told Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper.
The Algerian authorities have declined to confirm whether the alleged Canadian co-ordinator was among the 29 militants who died.
One of the hostage takers was a North American who took part in the killing of numerous Japanese workers, the AFP agency reported. An Algerian employee of a Japanese engineering firm working at the site, identified as Riad said the Islamist attackers shot three Japanese who were in a bus, then went straight to the rooms occupied by the Japanese.
“One terrorist shouted ‘Open the door’ with a North American accent, then fired,” he told AFP. “Two other Japanese died and we found four other Japanese bodies inside the base.”
One of the kidnappers was tall, blond with blue or green eyes and spoke English, an Algerian military source told the Norwegian daily Aftenposten. Norway’s Statoil energy company was one of the two foreign firms operating at the gas complex.
i take back what i said, french are savages and the jihad need to massacre them en masse
Edited by mustang19 ()
Now look at the other triangle, the smaller one to the South. You’ll see it stabs up from the wetter (and wetter’s better) land where the desert greens up, up into the desert, along the river. This triangle, you’ll notice, tilts to the west, toward the coast. It’s part of what they used to call “Sub-Saharan Africa,” and its people aren’t Tuareg or Arab herders but black African farming peoples like the Songhay and various Mande groups. This is what “Mali” actually means; this is where people live. Northern Mali is a wasteland, and “Central Mali” is, at the moment, a combat zone, or more like a tectonic plate where the desert clans, who have next to nothing in common with the French-speaking black people of the south, are pushing back, with some help from the momentum of all the quasi-jihadist wars of the Maghrib, the North African coastal rim. Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, even frickin’ Mauritania; they’re all more or less at war, and that gives the desert clans, who have been on a long losing streak, a little window of opportunity. For now, the Tuareg, Moor and Arab clans up there in the big nowhere can punch above their weight, using imported wannabe-martyrs and imported guns.
thirdplace posted:it is funny how in english "the base" is a value-neutral term used all over the political media but when you translate it into arabic boy howdy!
My favourite was back in 2003 and 2004 where Americans couldn’t even hear about Al Jazeera without subconsciously linking it to the terrorists
deadken posted:theres no such thing as al qaeda FuckNugget
you're denying the existence of white privilege in progressive terrorist organizations. you're on the side of the oppressor
Ironicwarcriminal posted:thirdplace posted:
it is funny how in english "the base" is a value-neutral term used all over the political media but when you translate it into arabic boy howdy!
My favourite was back in 2003 and 2004 where Americans couldn’t even hear about Al Jazeera without subconsciously linking it to the terrorists
2003/2004 lol
jeffery posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
thirdplace posted:
it is funny how in english "the base" is a value-neutral term used all over the political media but when you translate it into arabic boy howdy!
My favourite was back in 2003 and 2004 where Americans couldn’t even hear about Al Jazeera without subconsciously linking it to the terrorists
2003/2004 lol
2003 was the year The Postal Service released their one and only studio album to date, Give Up
that was followed a year later in 2004 by the indie hit film Garden State featuring Zach Braff and Natalie Portman