On May 2, 2022, a statement was made by Mali’s military spokesperson Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga on the country’s national television, where he said that Mali was ending the defense accords it had with France, effectively making the presence of French troops in Mali illegal.
The statement was written by the military leadership of the country, which has been in power since May 2021.
Colonel Maïga said that there were three reasons why Mali’s military had taken this dramatic decision.
The first was that they were reacting to France’s “unilateral attitude,” reflected in the way France’s military operated in Mali and in the June 2021 decision by French President Emmanuel Macron to withdraw French forces from the country “without consulting Mali.”
France’s military forces moved to nearby Niger thereafter and continued to fly French military planes over Malian airspace.
These violations of Malian airspace “despite the establishment of a temporary no-fly zone by the Malian military authorities” constituted the second reason for the new declaration, according to the statement.
Thirdly, Mali’s military had asked the French in December 2021 to revise the France-Mali Defense Cooperation treaty.
Apparently, France’s answer to relatively minor revisions from Mali on April 29 displeased the military, which then issued its statement a few days later.
Over the past few years, French forces in Mali have earned a reputation for ruthless use of aerial power that has resulted in countless civilian casualties.
A dramatic incident took place on January 3, 2021, in the village of Bounti in the central Mopti region of Mali, not far from Burkina Faso.
A French drone strike killed 19 civilians who were part of a wedding party.
On the day that the Malians said that the presence of French troops on their soil was illegal with the ending of the defense accords, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres paid a visit to neighboring Niger.
When France’s army withdrew from Mali, they relocated to Niger, whose president, Mohamed Bazoum, tweeted his welcome to these troops.
Guterres, standing beside Bazoum, said that terrorism is “not just a regional or African issue, but one that threatens the whole world.”
No one denies the fact that the chaos in the Sahel region of Africa was deepened by the 2011 NATO war against Libya.
Mali’s earlier challenges—including a decades-long Tuareg insurgency and conflicts between Fulani herders and Dogon farmers—were now convulsed by the entry of arms and men from Libya and Algeria.
Three jihadi groups appeared in the country as if from nowhere—Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Movement for the Unification of Jihad in the African West, and Ansar Dine.
They used the older tensions to seize northern Mali in 2012 and declared the state of Azawad. French military intervention followed in January 2013.
a famous 2017 audio message, Amadou Koufa said, “The day that France started the war against us, no Fulani or anyone else was practicing jihad.” That kind of warfare was a product of NATO’s war on Libya and the arrival of Al Qaeda, and later ISIS, to seek local franchise with local grievances to nurture their ambitions.
This landlocked state of more than 20 million people imports 70% of its food, the prices for which have skyrocketed in recent weeks, and could further worsen food insecurity in Mali.
Part of the instability of the post-NATO war has been the military coups in Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso.
Mali faces harsh sanctions from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), sanctions that will only deepen the crisis and provoke greater conflict north of Mali’s capital, Bamako.
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