Islamist extremists cut off thief's hand in northern Mali

A crowd in the village square pleaded in vain with the militants to spare the man, Reuters news agency reports. Northern Mali has been overrun by Islamist and Tuareg rebels following a coup in Bamako in March. The Islamists have vowed to implement strict Sharia law, despite strong opposition from the local Muslim population. 

 Last week, a couple who had s*x outside marriage were stoned to death in the town of Aguelhok, controlled by the Islamist group Ansar Dine. The group has also destroyed ancient shrines in Timbuktu, denouncing them as promoting idolatry. Mali's weak interim government said the amputation in Ansongo - carried out by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao) group - was a "vile act".

 Military intervention in the north was now inevitable, it said in a statement. Mujao official Mohamed Ould Abdine said the amputation was in accordance with the "law of God", the AFP news agency reports. "Sharia demands it," he said. map A local government official said dozens of people saw the amputation, AFP reports. "There was a lot of blood when the hand was cut. It was the hand of a thief who stole a motorbike," he said. 

 On Sunday, scores of protesters in the main regional town of Gao, about 100km (60 miles) from Ansongo, prevented Islamists from carrying out an amputation. Mr Abdine said the sentence had only been postponed and would be implemented. Officials from the West African regional body, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), the African Union and the United Nations have been meeting in Bamako to discuss military intervention in the north.

 They hope to come up with enough details for the deployment of a force to win the backing of the UN Security Council, which has so far refused to endorse military intervention in Mali, the BBC's West Africa correspondent Thomas Fessy says. The Islamists took power in alliance with Tuareg rebels fighting for a separate state, but the two groups have since fallen out.

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Sharia in action in Mali: Couple stoned to d*ath for adultery

A couple accused of engaging in extramarital affairs have been stoned to d*ath by an Islamic militant group in control of northern Mali. 

 The young pair were publicly executed in the remote town of Aguelhok, near the vast West African nation's northern border with Algeria, on Sunday, a spokesman for the Ansar Dine ('defenders of the faith') group said.

 'These two people were married and had extra-conjugal relations. 'Our men on the ground in Aguelhok applied sharia [Islamic law],' Sanda Ould Bounama said on Monday. 'They both died right away and even asked for this application.

 'We don't have to answer to anyone over the application of sharia,' he said. Most people living in northern Mali have long practised Islam, but frustrations with the strict form of sharia being imposed by Islamists have sparked several protests in recent months. 

Ansar Dine and well-armed allies, including Al Qaeda splinter group Mujwa, have hijacked a separatist uprising by local Tuareg rebels and now control two-thirds of north Mali's desert - including Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.

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Malian jihadist group threatens to attack Nigeria

An al-Qaeda-linked group based in Northern Mali has promised to attack Nigeria and other West African countries involved in raising a regional force against the jihadist insurrection in Northern Mali. 

 The French news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP), in a report on Friday quoted the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) which has taken over Northern Mali, threatening to attack the interests of countries that would join a military intervention force in that country. Nigeria is leading other Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries to raise a 3,270 intervention force to rid Northern Mali of a regime of religious extremists and reunite the country.

 Western diplomats have repeatedly warned that unless a drastic measure was taken, Northern Mali could become West Africa's Afghanistan where terrorists would be trained and deployed across the sub-region. The group, also including Ansar Dine and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has since imposed an austere version of sharia law in Northern Mali, and it has fallen out with the Tuaregs with whom it started the insurrection. 

 Tuareg rebels and Islamist hardliners had earlier jointly taken over a stretch of Northern Mali the size of Afghanistan. Leaders of ECOWAS met in Ivory Coast on Friday in a bid to end the crisis. MUJAO warned that its branches “in several countries are ready to strike the interests of countries that intend to participate in the force of ECOWAS,” spokesman, Adnan Abu Walid Sahraoui, said in a written message. 

 “The MUJAO is committed to providing all kinds of material and military support for young Muslims determined to raise the banner of Islam. The scene today is open for jihadists,” said the statement sent to an AFP correspondent in the Malian capital, Bamako. Mali has been gripped by chaos since disgruntled troops swarmed Bamako in the South in March and ousted the elected president of what had been seen as one of Africa’s model democracies. 

 The West African leaders who gathered Friday in Yamoussoukro called on the United Nations (UN) Security Council to speed up the adoption of a resolution authorising the regional force. The ECOWAS force requires international support for such an operation. It also needs logistics support from the United States and France. A first draft was considered too imprecise by the UN Security Council, and ECOWAS is reviewing the proposal. 

 The heads of state meeting in the Ivorien official capital renewed their “commitment to a peaceful settlement,” but reiterated their decision to use armed intervention if necessary, according to the final statement. The MUJAO, for its part, claimed responsibility on Friday for an attack in Algeria — against the regional headquarters of the paramilitary police in the town of Ouargla in which one person was killed and three were wounded. 

 It said in a text message to AFP in Bamako that a young Algerian from the Southern town of Ouargla had carried out the attack, using a Toyota 4×4 car with “almost 1,300 kilograms of explosives.” “The cells of the MUJAO branch in Algeria succeeded in carrying out a rapid punishment for the Algerian authorities,” the spokesman, Sahraoui, said. 

 The MUJAO spokesman said the group accused Algeria of encouraging Tuareg rebels to go to war with it, although the secular MNLA Tuaregs had three months ago fought together with the Islamists to take control of North Mali. The Islamists chased the MNLA out of Gao in the North-East on Wednesday after vicious fighting that left at least 20 dead, witnesses said. On Friday, the Islamists were reinforced by jihadists who arrived from Algeria, various sources said.

 Few days ago reported Nigeria, Niger and Senegal as key countries that had pledged to provide the core of a 3,270-strong force which mission would initially be bolstering Mali's fragmented army and stabilising political institutions, and then tackling the rebel-held North, if talks fail. Of the 15 UN Security Council members, France, Morocco and Togo were among the most enthusiastic about swiftly endorsing an ECOWAS operation in Francophone Mali, council envoys said. 

Others, they added, are more skeptical. France's U.N. mission announced a more optimistic assessment of the Security Council talks with ECOWAS and the AU. “We have made good progress at ECOWAS/UNSC talks to help Mali uphold its constitutional order and territorial integrity,” the mission announced on its Twitter feed.

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Afghans, Pakistanis training Islamists in Mali

Jihadi fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan are training Islamist groups in northern Mali, Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou told France 24 television on Thursday. “We have information on the presence of Afghans and Pakistanis in northern Mali… They are believed to be working as instructors,” he told the French news channel. 

 “They are the ones who are training those who have been recruited across various west African countries,” said Issoufou, whose country shares a long and porous desert border with Mali. Mali, once considered a beacon of democracy in western Africa, has plunged into chaos since the collapse of Moamer Kadhafi’s regime in Libya last year scattered mercenaries and weapons across the Sahel. 

Tuareg rebels rekindled their decades-old struggle for independence in January and conquered the entire northern half of Mali virtually unopposed in March, after renegade soldiers who accused then-president Amadou Toumani Toure of failing to do enough to fight the rebellion toppled his regime. 

The Tuareg rebels fought alongside a previously unknown Islamist group called Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith), which is believed to be backed by Al Qaeda’s north African branch. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has been active for years in northern Mali, where it has launched attacks against government army positions, kidnapped foreigners and allegedly benefitted from drug running. Issoufou said the Islamist groups are part of a global network spanning much of Africa and reaching all the way to Afghanistan. 

 “I think all these organisations cooperate amongst themselves, whether the Shebab in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, AQIM in Algeria and in the Sahel in general, all the way to Afghanistan,” he said. “Our concern is that the Sahel not become a new Afghanistan.” The comments came as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded the alarm Thursday over the continuing threat posed by Al Qaeda even in the wake of the killing of its mastermind, Osama bin Laden. 

 “The core of Al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks may be on the path to defeat, but the threat has spread, becoming more geographically diverse,” Clinton said in an opening address to the Global Counterterrorism Forum in Istanbul. Government troops have no control over Mali’s north, a territory larger than France, heightening fears in the region and beyond that the landlocked country could become a new global haven for Al Qaeda. 

Talks on a possible military intervention in Mali opened Thursday in Abidjan between officials from the United Nations, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Participants at the talks will discuss whether to ask the UN Security Council to authorise military action in Mali, said Ivory Coast Foreign Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of West African regional bloc ECOWAS.

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Mali coup leaders to hand over to parliamentary speaker ,ECOWAS rejects Northern Mali’s independence

Coup leaders in Mali have agreed to hand over and allow a transition to civilian rule, as part of a deal struck with regional bloc, ECOWAS. In return, the bloc will lift trade and economic sanctions and grant amnesty to the ruling junta, mediators said. The move came after Tuareg rebels in the north declared independence of territory they call Azawad. 

The rebels seized the area after a coup two weeks ago plunged the West African nation into political crisis. Under the terms of transition plan, military rulers will cede power to the parliamentary speaker, Diouncounda Traore, who as interim president will oversee a timetable for elections. Once sworn in, Mr Traore would have 40 days to organise elections, the five-page agreement says. After four days of a total economic embargo, the announcement will certainly come as a relief for the Malian population. 

The agreement says that ECOWAS will immediately prepare for the lifting of the tough sanctions it imposed on Mali earlier this week. The agreement doesn’t specify when Captain Amadou Sanogo will hand over power to the head of the national assembly. However, Tuareg-led rebels have declared independence for a vast land of lawlessness and confusion from which at least half the population, already impoverished, has fled either south or into neighbouring countries. 

 Meanwhile, the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS’) Commission has denounced and described as null, void and of no effect the declaration of independence by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) for the north of Mali. The MNLA had declared the independence after capturing Mali’s Northern Tuareg Region from the government. In a swift reaction, the President of the ECOWAS’ commission, Kadré Désiré Ouédraogo, said the commission wished to remind all the armed groups in the north of Mali that Mali was one and indivisible entity. 

 He maintained that ECOWAS would take all necessary measures, including the use of force, to ensure the territorial integrity of the country. The statement reads, "The commission wishes to remind all the armed groups in the North of Mali that Mali is one and indivisible entity "ECOWAS wishes to reaffirm its commitment to the unity and territorial integrity of Mali, and to put all on guard against any temptation to proclaim any part of Mali as a sovereign state, as it will never recognize any such state."

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Mali’s rebels declare independence in the north

Mali’s Tuareg rebels declared independence Friday in the north, splitting the coup-wracked country in two, as warnings rang out of a looming humanitarian disaster in what was a democratic bastion in west Africa. However, France said the declaration of an independent homeland had no standing if not recognised by other African states amid international alarm over Mali’s swift collapse in the two weeks since a coup in the capital Bamako. 

 A democratic success since its last coup 21 years ago, Mali is now roughly divided into a rebel-controlled north and junta-controlled south and a group of radical Islamists have exploited the chaos to swoop in and install sharia law in xxxx. Humanitarian groups have warned the country is on the brink of catastrophe as hundreds of thousands of people flee the unrest and rebels loot food and medicine supplies across an arid region already facing food shortages. 

 A Tuareg rebel group early Friday declared the independence of their desert homeland which they call Azawad, which has been the subject of several rebellions in the northern triangle of the bow-tie shaped nation. The latest has been fuelled by a hemorrhaging of weapons from Libya following Moamer Khadafi’s downfall. “We solemnly proclaim the independence of Azawad as from today,” Mossa Ag Attaher, a spokesman for Mali’s National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), said on France 24 television, confirming a statement on the group’s website.

 He said the MNLA, which captured northern Mali with Islamist groups over the past two weeks following a coup in the capital, would respect “the borders with other states” and would halt all military operations. French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet said Friday: “A unilateral declaration of independence that was not recognised by African states would have no meaning.”

 After decades of fighting for independence analysts warn it will not be easy to dislodge the Tuareg from the north now that they have staked their claim. And not all northerners will accept their claim of independence. West Africa expert Paul Melly of London-based Chatham House said Mali cannot be considered “definitively partitioned.” 

 “Much of the population of the north, particularly towns like Gao and Timbuktu and the farming villages of the Niger valley, is made up of sub-Saharan Africa ethnic groups such as the Songhai and the Peul, who consider themselves to be Malian and have no interest in an independent Tuareg state.”

 However, despite the triumph by the MNLA their hold on the desert looked tenuous. Ansar Dine, their Islamist comrades-turned-rebels set about imposing Islamic sharia law and kidnapped seven Algerian diplomats in the northeast. Algeria’s foreign ministry said an unidentified group had attacked its consulate in the town of Gao and kidnapped the consul and six staff members. Amnesty International warned that north Mali was on the brink of a “major humanitarian disaster” while Oxfam and World Vision said crippling sanctions against the junta could have devastating consequences. 

 “All the food and medicine stored by major aid agencies has been looted and most of the aid workers have fled,” said Gaetan Mootoo, Amnesty International’s researcher on west Africa. “The population is at imminent risk of severe food and medical shortages that could lead to many casualties especially among women and children who are less able to fend for themselves.” 

 More than 200,000 people have fled since the rebellion began in mid-January. Angry at government’s handling of the insurgency a group of low-ranking soldiers lead by Captain Amadou Sanogo on March 22 ousted President Amadou Toumani Toure just weeks before he was due to step down after an election. ECOWAS army chiefs on Thursday drew up a “mandate” for a 2,000-strong force that could be sent into a section of Mali the size of France that is now in Tuareg separatist and Islamist hands. However, an ECOWAS official said after a 12-hour meeting in the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan that the military plan still needed approval from regional heads of state. 

 In Bamako on Thursday, regional mediator Burkina Faso Foreign Minister Djibrill Bassole said an announcement in “the right direction” was expected from coup leader Sanogo and that sanctions could be lifted soon. Witnesses on the ground and observers say that the real new masters of Mali’s northern desert are not the Tuareg nomads but the Ansar Dine led by Iyad Ag Ghaly, which has connections with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Ansar Dine, “Defenders of Faith” in Arabic, has ordered women to wear headscarves and threatened to cut off the hands of thieves in the ancient city of Timbuktu, once the jewel in Mali’s tourism industry. The UN Security Council this week called for an immediate ceasefire but proposed no firm action as the two-week-old junta floundered.

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Coup d'état in Mali, Soldiers over throw government this morning

Soldiers early this morning stormed the Mali state TV and announced that they have seized control of the country, dissolving all of its institutions. The soldiers, who were about 20 in number, introduced themselves as the National Committee for the Reestablishment of Democracy and the Restoration of the State, or CNRDR and said they are ceasing power from government because of the government's mishandling of an insurgency in the north. Their statement:

The CNRDR representing all the elements of the armed forces, defensive forces and security forces has decided to assume its responsibilities and end the incompetent and disavowed regime of (President) Amadou Toumani Toure. All the institutions of the republic are dissolved until further notice. ... The objective of the CNRDR does not in any way aim to confiscate power, and we solemnly swear to return power to a democratically elected president as soon as national unity and territorial integrity are established.

The series of events that culminated in the coup began on Wednesday morning at a military camp in the capital, during a visit by Defense Minister Gen. Sadio Gassama. In his speech to the troops, the minister failed to address the grievances of the rank-and-file soldiers, who are angry over what they say is the government's mismanagement of a rebellion in the north by Tuareg separatists. The rebellion has claimed the lives of numerous soldiers, and those sent to fight are not given sufficient supplies, including arms or food. Their widows have not received compensation.

Recruits started firing into the air Wednesday, and they stoned the general's car as it raced away. By afternoon, soldiers had surrounded the state television station in central Bamako, yanking both the television and radio signals off the air for more than 7 hours. By Wednesday evening, troops had started rioting at a military garrison located in the northern town of Gao, some 2,000 miles away.

A freelance journalist from Sweden who was driving to her hotel near the TV station at around 4 p.m. local time on Wednesday, said that trucks full of soldiers had surrounded the state broadcaster.

"We saw a couple of trucks, with military on them. They came and started setting up checkpoints. There were military in the streets, stopping people," said Katarina Hoije. "When we reached our hotel which is just in front of the TV station, there were lots of military outside, and more cars kept arriving -- pickup trucks with soldiers on them."

She said that they set up two machine guns facing the building.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said: "The situation is currently unclear and unfolding quickly," she said. "There are reports of military forces surrounding the presidential palace and movement of vehicles between the palace and the military barracks."

The Tuareg uprising that began in mid-January is being fueled by arms leftover from the civil war in neighboring Libya. Tens of thousands of people have fled the north, and refugees have spilled over into four of the countries neighboring Mali due to the uprising.

The government has not disclosed how many soldiers have been killed, but the toll has been significant. In February, military widows led a protest. In an attempt to diffuse tension, the Malian president allowed himself to be filmed meeting the widows, who publicly grilled him on his handling of the rebellion.

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