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Maybe they just want to become martyrs and meet these virgins in Paradise.
Maybe they just want to become martyrs and meet these virgins in Paradise.
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Remember, Tinnie, we are all Palestinians now and the Malis are an extension of the family.
Are you lost again?
This is the Israel and Palestine forum.
Are you lost again?
This is the Israel and Palestine forum.
The death of the Algerian warlord, a feared radical leader of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb behind the kidnapping of several Westerners, could not immediately be verified. His death would be a big blow to his group and its growing influence in North and West Africa. Officials in Mali and in France, which is leading an international military intervention in Mali against Islamic extremists linked to AQIM, could not confirm the death. The White House had no immediate reaction to the announcement. The U.S. has offered drones and intelligence help to the French-led operation.
The Chadian president's spokesman said that Deby announced the death of Abou Zeid during a ceremony Friday for Chadian soldiers killed in fighting in Mali. Deby said, "It was our soldiers who killed two big Islamist chiefs in northern Mali," including Abou Zeid, according to the spokesman. The spokesman insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak ahead of an announcement on state television on the matter. It was unclear when it was expected, and the spokesman gave no further details. Chadian television showed images of Friday's tribute to the fallen soldiers from Chad, a row of coffins draped with the blue, yellow and red flags, and dignitaries from Chad and neighboring countries.
Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, who led one of the most violent brigades of al-Qaida's North African franchise and helped lead the extremist takeover of northern Mali, was thought to be 47 years old. He was a pillar of the southern realm of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, responsible for the death of at least two European hostages. He was believed to be holding four French nationals kidnapped two years ago at a uranium mine in Niger. The fate of those hostages, working for French company Areva, was unclear Friday night. Abou Zeid held a Frenchman released in February 2010, and another who was executed that July. He's also been linked to the execution of a British hostage in 2009.
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However, there were no public celebrations in Paris on Monday as relatives of hostages held in the region voiced fears the development leaves their loved ones at greater risk and called for a pause in the bombing to allow for negotiations aimed at securing their release. Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, a senior figure in al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was killed last week in a French bombing raid in the Adrar des Ifoghas, an AQIM militant told private Mauritanian news agency Sahara Medias.
However, the source insisted that another Islamist leader, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was alive and still fighting, contradicting claims over the weekend from Chad that its troops had killed Belmokhtar, the mastermind of the January assault on an Algerian gas plant that left 37 foreign hostages dead. A French broadcaster on Monday published a photograph taken on cellphone which it said showed the bloodied body of Belmokhtar. Radio France Internationale said it was taken by a Chadian soldier.
With foreign governments reacting cautiously to claims about the deaths of the top militants, Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno on Monday said his country had only refrained from showing the bodies out of respect for Muslim customs. The claims of Abou Zeids death came as Frances top military official claimed that the intervention launched in January was breaking the back of AQIM and its allies.
It also coincided with a call by relatives of four of the French hostages held in the region for a pause in the bombing to allow for negotians for their release. Fears that the hostages could be subjected to reprisal executions have intensified as the reports of the militants killings emerged. Abou Zeid was believed to have been holding four French citizens kidnapped in Niger in 2010, but French Army chief of staff Admiral Edouard Guillaud said that could not be confirmed.
Source confirms death of al-Qaeda leader in Mali - Taipei Times
Paris launched a ground and air operation in its former colony in January to break the Islamist rebel hold on the northern two-thirds of the country, saying the militants posed a threat to the security of West Africa and Europe. The rapid offensive took back most of the territory seized by the militants, but has failed to stop them from waging a guerrilla war. On Friday, suspected Islamists carried out three suicide attacks on soldiers from Mali and Niger in northern Mali, wounding a Malian soldier. At least five bombers died.
In a document drawn up for an international donors conference in Brussels on Wednesday, the Malian government said it would be able to finance just more than half of a 4.34 billion euro plan for this year and next, but needed help with the rest. The international community is greatly needed to finance and implement the plan, up to a level of 1.96 billion euros, the government said in the document, posted in French on the conference Web site. To get out of the crisis and to begin lasting development, Mali needs and depends on the technical and financial support of the international community, it said.
The plan sets out 12 priorities, including keeping the peace, organizing credible elections and fighting corruption. Next weeks conference, organized by France and the EU, will aim to raise at least US$600 to US$700 million, diplomatic sources said. Scheduled to attend are Malian interim president Dioncounda Traore, several other African leaders, French President Francois Hollande and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
France is now looking to withdraw thousands of its troops and hand over security duties to a UN peacekeeping mission. Donors who suspended assistance to Mali following a military coup in March last year have resumed budget support and project aid. The EU has unblocked 250 million euros in frozen development aid and Paris has restored 150 million euros, including a 10 million euro emergency assistance fund to rebuild key services such as water and electricity.
Mali asks donors for 2bn euros to rebuild country - Taipei Times
The photocopies of the manual lay in heaps on the floor, in stacks that scaled one wall, like Xeroxed, stapled handouts for a class. Except that the students in this case were al-Qaida fighters in Mali. And the manual was a detailed guide, with diagrams and photographs, on how to use a weapon that particularly concerns the United States: A surface-to-air missile capable of taking down a commercial airplane.
The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered by The Associated Press in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. And it confirms that the al-Qaida cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, which likely came from the arms depots of ex-Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
"The existence of what apparently constitutes a 'Dummies Guide to MANPADS' is strong circumstantial evidence of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb having the missiles," said Atlantic Council analyst Peter Pham, a former adviser to the United States' military command in Africa and an instructor to U.S. Special Forces. "Why else bother to write the guide if you don't have the weapons? ... If AQIM not only has the MANPADS, but also fighters who know how to use them effectively," he added, "then the impact is significant, not only on the current conflict, but on security throughout North and West Africa, and possibly beyond."
This is not the first al-Qaida-linked group thought to have MANPADS - they were circulating in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a terror cell in Somalia recently claimed to have the SA-7 in a video. But the U.S. desperately wanted to keep the weapons out of the hands of al-Qaida's largest affiliate on the continent, based in Mali. In the spring of 2011, before the fighting in Tripoli had even stopped, a U.S. team flew to Libya to secure Gadhafi's stockpile of thousands of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles. By the time they got there, many had already been looted.
See more at: Manual Found in Mali Suggests al-Qaida Has Surface-to-Air Missile | CNS News