French soldiers sweep rebel stronghold in Malian desert

UNDER the cover of large acacia trees, Malian militants’ camp was invisible from the sky and had probably been deserted only a few hours before the arrival of French troops in a new operation designed to root out the insurgents.
The soldiers had made the discovery on day two of Operation Gustav, a hunt for Islamist fighters in a valley in northern Mali and one of France’s largest military operations during its three-month intervention in its former colony.
The soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Regiment advanced tentatively on foot in battle formation ahead of several tanks, uncovering weapons, the remnants of bivouacs, camping equipment and fuel drums.
A thousand French troops backed by tanks and covered from the air had surrounded the valley near the city of Gao, thought to be a logistics base of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), at dawn on Sunday, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.
A captain called Arnaud, who would not give his full name, noted the coordinates of each discovery made by his men, reminding them to touch nothing in case of booby-traps, and to await the engineering specialists.
“They left the scene in a rush. They were probably informed of our movements when we left Gao,” he said.
“They have left behind a lot of things they would normally carry with them. They were obviously in a hurry.”
Operation Gustav comes with France preparing to withdraw three-quarters of the 4,000 troops it deployed in January to block a feared advance on the Malian capital Bamako by Al Qaeda-linked insurgents.
Its intervention has driven the militants from most of their northern strongholds but Paris is preparing to hand over to a UN-mandated African force in the coming weeks, leaving just 1,000 of its troops to fight terrorism.
The Malian military — poorly paid, ill-equipped and badly organised — fell apart last year in the face of an uprising by Tuareg rebels who seized the vast arid north in the chaos which followed a military coup, before losing control to well-armed Islamists.