Timbuktu surrounded
Noose tightens around rebels as French troops seize airport
BAMAKO: French-led troops surrounded Mali’s fabled desert city of Timbuktu after seizing its airport in a lightning advance against insurgents who have been driven from key northern strongholds.
French paratroopers swooped in to block any fleeing militants while ground troops coming from the south seized the airport in the ancient city, which has been one of the bastions of the extremists controlling the north for 10 months.
“We control the airport at Timbuktu,” a senior officer with the Malian army said. “We did not encounter any resistance.”
French army spokesman Colonel Thierry Burkhard said the troops, backed up by helicopters, had seized control of the so-called Niger Loop – the area along the curve of the Niger River flowing between Timbuktu and Gao – in less than 48 hours.
A fabled caravan town on the edge of the Sahara desert, Timbuktu was for centuries a key centre of Islamic learning and has become a byword for exotic remoteness in the Western imagination.
The extremists who seized the town forced women to wear veils, whipped and stoned those who violated their version of strict law, and destroyed ancient Muslim shrines they considered idolatrous.
“We will liberate Timbuktu very soon,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told France 2 television channel. “Little by little, Mali is being freed.
“This has been a very complicated operation but until now very well managed,” he said.
A source in a reconnaissance team which first reached Timbuktu on Sunday said Malian and French troops had not yet entered the city.
“We are in town but we are not many. But the Islamists caused damages before leaving.
“They burned houses, and manuscripts. They beat people who were showing their joy.”
The advance into Timbuktu known as “the City of 333 Saints“, which lies 1,000km north of Mali’s capital Bamako, comes a day after French and Malian soldiers seized another militant bastion, the eastern town of Gao.
The French defence ministry said a French armoured battalion, Malian troops and soldiers from Niger and Chad were in control of Gao after fighting on Saturday in which “several terrorist groups were destroyed or chased to the north”.
French warplanes had carried out some 20 air strikes on Saturday and Sunday in the Gao and Timbuktu regions, the ministry statement added.
Gao is the biggest of six towns seized by French and Malian troops since they launched their offensive on Jan 11 to wrest the vast desert north from militants.
The largest town yet to be recaptured is Kidal further north near the Algerian border which was the first to be seized by an alliance of Tuareg rebels and extremists last year.