Never-ending conflict

Renewed fighting in the Central African Republic (CAR) has forced more than 20,000 people to flee to a UN base to seek safety and shelter. In northern CAR humanitarian workers have suspended relief efforts in the area, leaving thousands vulnerable. The withdrawal of the World Food Programme because of security concerns will impact about 120,000 people dependent on food supplies, and 35,000 others living precariously in surrounding camps for internally displaced people.

Houses have been razed and three sites for IDPs have been attacked, forcing civilians to seek help at the UN stabilisation mission base (MINUSCA) in the area.

At least 65 people have been killed over the past four weeks in violence across the western, eastern and central parts of the country. Last week, 25 people were killed in two days of violence in and around the town of Bambari. Earlier in the month, 40 people - including three school teachers - were killed when Kaga Bandero town was attacked, allegedly by ex-Seleka rebels. The UN repelled the attack, killing 12 fighters.

ladimir Monteiro, MINUSCA's spokesperson in Bangui, told Al Jazeera the violence over the past month and a half has been perpetuated by "…armed groups who have been manipulated. Some of the actions are being fuelled by politicians who are against the government. Eleven out of the 13 armed groups are in talks with government, but there are others who are looking to create instability in the country," Monteiro said. MINUSCA has been in the spotlight for the past 18 months after scores of allegations of child rape and other sexual abuse by its peacekeepers. French troops have also been accused of committing sexual abuse against civilians, including minors.

Not all the violence was political, with some likely stemming from conflict over cattle.

CAR has struggled with political insecurity ever since the Seleka rebels, a Muslim-led armed group, overthrew the government in a 2003 coup, leading to a series of atrocities and then reprisal attacks by a viglante group called the anti-Balaka, made up of Christian and animist fighters. Both anti-Balaka and Seleka groups have been accused of widespread human rights abuse against civilians, including murder, sexual violence, and mass displacement.  More than 400,000 people have been displaced internally and almost half a million others have fled to neighbouring countries. French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is expected to formally end French military intervention, known as Operation Sangaris, that began in December 2013. There are currently 350 French troops in the country. Currently 12,000 peacekeepers operate in CAR.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/central-african-republic-20000-stranded-base-161030144503824.html

South Sudan's Kiir and Machar profited during war

South Sudan's political and military elite have made themselves rich while the country has struggled under a civil war of their making, a report says.

The document accuses President Salva Kiir, opposition leader Riek Machar, and top generals of profiteering.It follows the trail of money with links to the families of both Kiir and  Machar.

Entitled "War Crimes Shouldn't Pay", the report has found that "top officials ultimately responsible for mass atrocities in South Sudan have at the same time managed to accumulate fortunes, despite modest government salaries. Some have been involved in questionable business deals while others have apparently received large payments from corporations doing business in South Sudan."

 A fall-out between President Kiir and former Vice-President Machar - the most powerful members of their respective Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups - led to the civil war which erupted in December 2013.
Terrible atrocities have been carried out by both sides - often along ethnic lines.
Mass rape has been used as a weapon of war and United Nations reports have detailed human rights abuses.We reported on this here.

Some 2.5 million people have been forced from their homes, and millions more need food aid.

 When a peace deal between the two men fell apart amid heavy fighting of the streets of the capital Juba in July, any chance of a quick resolution to the crisis crumbled.
"This war is about rival factions of a kleptocratic network trying to gain control of the state," said JR Mailey, the author of the report by The Sentry, which is a collaboration between The Enough Project, Not On Our Watch, and C4ADS.

 It says President Kiir's wife and at least seven of his children were linked to a whole range of businesses, and has evidence that Kiir's 12-year-old son had a 25% share in a holding company.
It says a company linked to his brother-in-law, Gen. Gregory Vasili Dimitry, supplied fuel to the military while he was a senior officer.

 It details business connections between Gen Vasili and the Kiirs, and says that the two families hold interests in almost two dozen companies.
"I was mostly struck by the breadth of sectors in which these top officials are involved," said JR Mailey, the author of the report."We're talking everything from airlines, to banks, oil companies, mining companies, casinos. It seems that a very small number of people control a large swathe of South Sudan's economy - and many of these people are also the people that are in power," he said.

 Machar is accused of dealing with a Ukrainian arms company through a Russian intermediary with multiple aliases.
"What we found on Vice-President Machar, he had been engaged in negotiations to sell the country's oil production for defence products - for weapons in order to fuel his rebellion," said Mailey. "We also found evidence that a nephew of his was involved in a violent and hostile takeover of a security company operating in South Sudan."

It says both President Kiir and  Machar have luxurious homes in the same upmarket neighbourhood of Nairobi.

Top generals are also implicated in business deals, with large amounts of money going through their bank accounts. Army chief of staff Gen. Paul Malong Awan is accused of having close business connections to President Kiir and his family and having luxury villas.

 The report says Deputy General Malek Reuben Riak, and a general sanctioned by the US, Gabriel Jok Riak, had millions of dollars passing through their foreign bank accounts, despite salaries of less than $50,000 (£37,730).

The Sentry recommends using a "new approach to countering mass atrocities...That involves using the tools of financial pressure that were developed to counter nuclear proliferation and organised crime and terrorism," said Mr Mailey. "We want those tools to be deployed aggressively in South Sudan. In the past these sanctions have only been applied in a piecemeal fashion and we think sanctions need to be accompanied by robust anti-money laundering measures," he said.

 An expanded international peacekeeping force for South Sudan is due to help bring a peace deal back on track, but there's little confidence the crisis - affecting so many millions of people - will be resolved any time soon.

"There are few people in the world who have suffered as much during the past half century as the South Sudanese who suffered three major wars and watched their leaders and international enablers profit from their misery," Don Cheadle, co-founder of Not On Our Watch said at the news conference.

Compiled from a BBC article here

More from this blog on South Sudan here

South Sudan's Misleaders

One year after South Sudan's peace agreement, the head of the truce's monitoring group has said the country is worse off today than it was before.

Festus Mogae, head of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC) and former Botswanan president, said that the largest problems stemmed from "security... that is where we've made the least amount of progress."

Mogae said the main reason behind the peace agreement's failure stems from the "bad blood" between Kiir and Machar, rather than the deal itself.  "It was never with the agreement...We were trying to persuade him [Kiir] that they were leaders and they should think of the welfare of the people, but they failed to do that…the leaders as a whole have duty to work together to bring about peace and being to develop this country," said Mogae. "For now, the people of South Sudan are worse off than before."

Tens of thousands of people died in the conflict that followed. Many starved to death. More than two million people were displaced.

South Sudan's Bloody Civil War

A United Nations reports that militias allied to the South Sudanese army have been allowed to rape women in lieu of wages during fighting against rebel forces. Army-affiliated militias, made up mainly of youths, raped and abducted women and girls essentially as a form of payment, under an agreement that allowed them to “do what you can and take what you can,” the UN team reported. The militias stole cattle and other property under the same understanding, the team said.

Investigators found that 1,300 women were raped last year in the oil-rich Unity state alone. The scale and type of sexual violence committed in South Sudan is the most horrendous human rights abuse in the world, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said. “This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, with massive use of rape as an instrument of terror and weapon of war, yet it has been more or less off the international radar,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said in a statement.

The UN said government fighters abducted and gang-raped girls, and cut civilians to pieces. One woman said she had watched her 15-year-old daughter being raped by 10 soldiers after her husband was killed. The United Nations assessment team recorded gruesome accounts of civilians, including women and children, being hanged from trees, burned alive, shot and hacked to pieces with machetes. Churches, mosques and hospitals came under attack, the team said.

 “Crimes against humanity and war crimes have continued into 2015, and they have been predominantly perpetrated by the government,” David Marshall, the coordinator of a United Nations assessment team, said in an interview

Amnesty International says more than 60 men and boys were suffocated in a shipping container by government forces. Amnesty International said bodies of those suffocated were dumped in a field after they were killed last October in Leer Town, Unity State. Amnesty International reported that government soldiers arbitrarily arrested dozens of men and boys in the villages of Luale and Leer in October of last year. The men rounded up were students, traders and cattle keepers rather than fighters. They then forced them into unventilated shipping containers with their hands tied behind their backs. Witnesses told researchers they heard the detainees crying, screaming in distress and banging on the walls of the container while officials watched. "Dozens of people suffered a slow and agonizing death at the hands of government forces that should have been protecting them," said Lama Fakih, Amnesty International senior crisis adviser.

Does the press care in CAR

Some media outlets believe that Muslims are only newsworthy when behind the gun, not in front of it. There has been systematic targeting of Muslims in the Central African Republic (CAR), a nation ravaged by strife since March of 2013, which has now developed into massive scale ethnic cleansing. In the past several weeks, armed militias have roved through the western part of the nation, intimidating and brutalising Muslims. Anti-Balaka, a fundamentalist group comprised of animists and Christians, is forcing Muslims to worship in private, remove religious garb, and convert at gunpoint. In addition to compelling Muslims to convert and decimating mosques, reports about Muslims paying anti-Balaka militants large sums of money to spare their lives are widespread. Anti-Balaka militants intensified their killing and forced-conversion spree during this past Ramadan, which proved dangerous, and even fatal, for CAR Muslims fasting, praying, and openly observing the holy month. Yet few are even minimally aware of the problem. Anti-Balaka's aim is as plain as it is gruesome: rid the nation of its Muslim population. At any cost. While the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) remains in the headlines, the mere mention of anti-Muslim terrorism in CAR - which has claimed at least 6,000 lives, pushed 30,000 Muslims to live in UN protected enclaves, and left scores of mosques destroyed - remains largely unknown. Would this be the case if Muslims were the villains of the human rights atrocities in CAR, instead of victims?

While the description “fundamentalist” seems reserved exclusively for Muslim groups, Christian and animist militias in CAR have brandished religious fervour to terrorise the nation's 750,000 Muslims - who make up 15 percent of the nation's population. The media quickly concentrtes attention towards Muslim villains, but it is consistently slow - or wholly absent - when the victims are Muslim. Mainstream media outlets have long neglected the humanitarian plight of black victims, particularly on the African continent. Unfortunately for the victims in CAR, they are both black and Muslim.

Media outlets may fashion themselves as objective bystanders, but they are functionally key actors in any unfolding crisis. Media coverage, particularly within the most prominent outlets, means far more than simply highlighting and sharing a story. Events like in CAR, coverage means generating global consciousness that would spur political mobilisation, fundraising, and pressure on governments to act, typically energised by the pressure headlines. Robust and active media intervention can check the actions of culprits and prompt humanitarian rescue, while neglect facilitates, and indeed emboldens, the aims of terrorists. The CAR case vividly illustrates the latter. Anti-Balaka forces have benefited immensely from the lack of coverage. Their numbers have grown, and their violence is ever increasing in severity.

Cameras and reporters flocked to Rwanda when it was far too late. When they arrived, the genocide had claimed virtually all of its targets. Since then, scores of scholars, human rights advocates, statesmen and stateswomen have argued that timely media attention could have created the pressure needed to spur more comprehensive humanitarian intervention. Thousands upon thousands of lives, and future generations of Tutsis, could have been saved. As highlighted in CAR, lessons from Rwanda have not been heeded, exposing its diminishing and imperiled Muslim population to unspeakable violence and arming its anti-Muslim militias with the green light to continue the killing spree.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201508190370.html

Sudan's ethnic cleansing

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) have forcibly relocated more than 25,000 Ingessana people from the Bao region in Blue Nile between April and July. The relocations to other parts of the state are part of a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to weaken opposition to the SAF’s armed offensive in the region. Blue Nile in Sudan’s south, along with neighbouring state South Kordofan, has been subjected to a concerted SAF aerial and ground assault since 2011.

The latest campaign of forced relocations began when soldiers stormed Medyam Eljebel village on April 10, chasing residents from their huts. Soldiers looted homes and burned the village to the ground. The army then went from village to village, telling families to evacuate to areas where they have no links or support networks. Similar incidents took place throughout May and June. On July 2, SAF and NISS units forced residents of Banat village onto trucks before dumping them in Abu Ramad, in Damazin locality.

Anyone who refuses to leave their village is deemed to be a member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) and faces arrest. SPLM-N chairperson Malik Agar originates from the Ingessana Hills and the entire Ingessana ethnic group are branded by the regime as rebel supporters. In 2011-12, the Ingessana community was subjected to a targeted campaign of bombing, scorched villages and large-scale arbitrary arrests. The Sudan Democracy First Group (SDFG) says the new offensive is being rolled out in stages to avoid scrutiny. It says the offensive reflects Sudan’s institutionalised military practice of “meting out different forms of collective punishment upon particular ethnic groups”.

The government is seeking to deny the SPLM-N public support in areas where the rebels have made military gains. The Sudan People's Liberation Army-North (the armed wing of the SPLM-N) has made big advances into government-held territory. This brings it closer to key areas containing mineral wealth, hydroelectric power and large-scale agricultural projects. The abundant resources in the region have long been a source of conflict. Khartoum controls the wealth generated by these resources while denying local investment in basic development and infrastructure. The SDFG says the whole state is in darkness at night aside from a few urban areas, despite the Roseris dam hydro power plant in Blue Nile contributing 20% of Sudan’s national electricity grid. The regime’s desperate need to maintain its grip on the resource-rich area amid deepening economic crisis was a key factor in launching its war on Blue Nile in 2011.

https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/59799

Bloody Africa - 2015 more of the same

The first two months of 2015 saw about 8 300 people die as a result of conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, with just five countries – Nigeria, Cameroon, Sudan, Somalia and Niger – accounting for roughly 90% of these deaths. The figures are extrapolated from the Armed Conflict Location and EventData (ACLED) project, which has tracked political violence in Africa since 1997. The 8 300 deaths in the first two months of 2015 compare with 6 300 deaths during the same period last year – a year in which 35 000 people died in conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. So far 40% (or 3 400) of conflict deaths in the region have been those of civilians targeted by armed groups.

Most violence was concentrated in West Africa, where conflict between armed forces and Islamist group Boko Haram, and Boko Haram attacks on civilians, accounted for the majority of conflict deaths. Boko Haram, which is said to have at least 15 000 members, largely draws its support from uneducated, unemployed and socio-economically disadvantaged Nigerian Northerners who are fed up with corruption, heavy-handed state security forces and neglect of the North. Conflict centred on Boko Haram activity which claimed roughly 5 700 lives in the country and that of its neighbours, Cameroon and Niger. (During the same period in 2014, 770 people were killed in Boko Haram-related violence.) The group is also reported to have gone on the offensive in neighbouring Cameroon and Niger, where a total of 930 and 500 deaths occurred in the first two months of this year.

In Sudan, the government is embroiled in war on two fronts: against rebels in Darfur, and against the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) in the southern states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile. These conflicts claimed 700 lives so far this year. The issues underlying the conflicts are similar to Nigeria’s: local grievance as a result of political and socio-economic marginalisation and the inequitable distribution of resources in the country. Persistent conflict between the Sudanese government and rebel movements in Darfur first flared up in 2003, when the Justice and Equality Movement and Sudan Liberation Army took up arms in protest at the region’s marginalisation. The government responded by unleashing Arab militias, called the Janjaweed, which targeted non-Arab Darfuris in a campaign of genocide, as it was referred to. Since then 400 000 people are thought to have died, and nearly 3-million displaced. Government attacks against rebels are said to have escalated: by early January, an estimated 115 villages had been evacuated or razed, with about 88 000 people displaced. About 277 people have been killed in battles between government forces, their allied militia and rebels since the beginning of 2015.

Conflict in Blue Nile and South Kordofan broke out soon after the secession of South Sudan in 2011. The SPLM-N in the two states had fought in the country’s independence war, but were separated from their southern neighbours in the final settlement. They soon began agitating for political autonomy, political reform and a more equitable distribution of Sudan’s oil riches. The rebel movement subsequently banded together with the armed opposition in Darfur under the banner of the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), formed with the aim of unseating Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. 255 were killed in battles between rebel forces and government so far this year.

In Somalia, 627 people have died in political conflict in the first two months of this year. The country has been fractured by violence since 1991, when then-president Siad Barre was pushed out of office. Clan warlords stepped up to fill the power vacuum left in his wake, leading to violent competition that effectively destroyed the state. While clan conflict continues to contribute to the country’s death toll, it is Islamist group al-Shabaab that constitutes the primary source of conflict in the country. Violence related to the group claimed 380 of the 627 lives lost through conflict in the Horn of Africa country in the first two months of 2015. These were largely battle-related, setting the group against national security forces and troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom).

South Sudan - Famine Warning

The United Nations says over 2.5 million people in South Sudan are on the brink of famine amid the destructive civil war in the country.

UN emergency relief coordinator Valerie Amos issued the warning on Monday during an international donor conference in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where the world body launched a 1.8-billion-dollar aid appeal.

The UN official referred to “the continuing widespread devastation and destruction,” in South Sudan and called for restoration of peace in the war-torn country.

According to the UN, 2.5 million people – about 20 percent of South Sudan’s population of 12 million -- are in a state of emergency or crisis, only few steps short of famine. More than half of the country’s population are in need of aid.

The UN predicted that the conflict would worsen in the dry season when military vehicles could move around more easily.

Amos, who has recently returned from a three-day visit to the African country, added, “The conflict has had a devastating impact on South Sudan but if peace doesn't come quickly, it will also have a significant regional impact.”

War - Economics by Other Means

Throughout the post-colonial period, internecine warfare—along with the poverty and underdevelopment that attend it—has been endemic to sub-Saharan Africa. The images are depressingly familiar: government forces fighting against armed rebel militias; terrorized, starving refugees fleeing for their lives; villages burned to the ground; women raped and men tortured.

Conflict seems to radiate from the continent’s heart. A 2001 Institute of Development Studies (IDS) report listed 28 sub-Saharan African countries that have been embroiled in some form of warfare since 1980, including Angola, Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan along with many others. Many have suffered fatalities in the hundreds of thousands along with the maiming and traumatization of countless victims. And then there is the broader toll. “Armed conflict,” observes the IDS report, “is arguably now the single most important determinant of poverty in Africa.”

In a 2001 study called The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts, researcher Philippe Le Billon analyzed the role of natural resources in armed conflict, both their scarcity and abundance. “The availability in nature of any resource is…not in itself a predictive indicator of conflict,” he wrote. “Rather, the desires sparked by this availability as well as people’s needs (or greed), and the practices shaping the political economy of any resource can prove conflictual, with violence becoming the decisive means of arbitration.” In other words, resource deposits themselves are not good predictors of conflict, but in an unstable political environment, resource markets can be.

In early November 2013, the militia group M23 surrendered after its defeat by the DRC army. Despite the general jubilation greeting this news, critics have warned that if no effort is made to address the root sources of violence in the eastern Congo—which include simmering ethnic tensions and a lucrative minerals trade—some other rebel group could easily arise in M23’s stead. In the DRC, the mineral that has up until recently fueled the war is called coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, from which tantalum is extracted. The tantalum capacitor is a stable and reliable component in smartphones, DVD players, laptops, hearing aids, and other devices. This has led critics of the mineral trade to lampoon smartphones as “blood phones,” a designation particularly aimed at the iPhone, although Apple is by no means the only guilty party. However, there are some indications that miners have switched to digging for gold, which has become much more profitable than the other so-called conflict minerals: tin, tungsten, and tantalum, known as the “three Ts.”

International markets for conflict commodities have often roped former colonial powers into resource wars directly. A case in point is Nigeria, where the entrenched hand of the British played a conniving role during the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970. Charismatic Colonel Odumewu Ojukwu led the attempted secession of southeastern Nigeria, which was to be called Biafra. If successful, the breakaway would have cut the oil production of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in half. The military government in Lagos, headed by General Yakubu Gowon, was not the only one panicked over the potential loss of all that crude oil. So were the British, who went on to aid Gowon with a steady supply of weapons. Abetting Gowon’s food blockade of Biafra, the British contributed to the starvation of Biafrans. Images of skeletal, pot-bellied children shocked the world, but the position of the British was clear: “The sole immediate British interest in Nigeria,” wrote Commonwealth Minister George Thomas in August 1967, “is that the Nigerian economy should be brought back to a condition in which our substantial trade and investment in the country can be further developed, and particularly so we can regain access to important oil installations. While Britain supported Nigeria, France and other countries covertly supplied weapons to Biafra. Did oil cause the Nigerian civil war? No. But was it an important contributing factor? Certainly.

However, as much as the minerals may be in the thick of the conflict, they aren’t necessarily the immediate cause of these wars. Rather, complex social and political factors in the region, many but not all of them colonial legacies, create an environment ripe for the outbreak of wars in which the valuable minerals become a funding source for the combatants. Some of these factors include social inequality and ethnic rivalries (Tutsis and Hutus of Rwanda and the DRC); peacetime kleptocracy (Siaka Stevens of Sierra Leone); a lack of employment opportunities for young men; disillusionment with government; weak democratic institutions; and poverty itself.

David Keen, in the book Greed & Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, makes the point that labels such as “ethnic hatred,” “mindless violence,” and “chaos” are applied chiefly by people who assume that the goal of any war should be victory. However, as Keen notes, sometimes the image of war serves as a smokescreen for the emergence of a wartime political economy from which rebels and even governments may be benefitting. Small wonder the warring factions may show little interest in negotiating a settlement. War for them is not just a continuation of politics by other means; it may be a continuation of economics by other means.

Full article here

Libya's civil war - The Berber uprising

“In 2011, we Amazighs took up arms against a regime that had treated us like dogs for decades. But two years later we are still struggling for our rights against the new Libyan government,” laments Younis.

Also called Berbers, the Amazigh are indigenous inhabitants of North Africa with a population extending from Morocco´s Atlantic coast to the west bank of the Nile, in Egypt. Touareg tribes deep in the Sahara desert share the same common language.

The arrival of the Arabs in the region in the seventh century was the starting point of a gradual process of Arabisation that was sharply boosted during Muammar Gaddafi´s four-decade rule in Libya. Estimates put the number of Amazighs in this country at around 600,000 – about 10 percent of the total population.

“We are the true guardians of the revolution” reads a banner.“The government does not recognise us and we do not recognise the government,” reads another.

“We´re strongly against the committee in charge of writing the new constitution, as we have literally no chance to achieve our rights as a people through it,” says Ayub Sufian, another member of the rebel group controlling the port. He is referring to the 60-member constituent assembly set to work on the draft of Libya’s post-Gaddafi constitution. The crux of the matter seems to be the six-seat quota given to the country´s minorities. “Two for the Amazigh, two for the Touareg and two for the Tubu [a group living in the far south of the country],” the rebel tells IPS. “It is a system that will rule on majorities of two-thirds plus one, so you basically need 41 votes out of 60 to reach an agreement. What are our choices as non-Arab Libyans? We want our language to be co-official, and we want to be able to decide on key issues concerning the country,” says the rebel spokesman, who would favour an agreement “based on consensus, not on majorities.”

the Mali mess

Only last month, asked about intervention in the strife-torn Central African Republic, the French President François Hollande replied: “Those days are over”. But apparently not. France (and Britain) appear to be embroiled in yet another war. French planes attacked targets,  The mayor of Konna, says the dead included children who drowned after they threw themselves into a river in an effort to escape the bombs. Britain has provided transport planes. Americans provides intelligence and logistical support, Niger, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Nigeria agreed to send soldiers to join hundreds of French troops. France, the only European country still to have a permanent military presence in Africa with several major military bases. French involvement in Mali dates back more than a hundred years. The current unrest erupted in Mali after President Amadou Toumani Toure was toppled in a military coup on March 22, 2012. The coup leaders said they had mounted the coup in response to the government's failure to contain the Tuareg rebellion in the north of the country, which had been going on for two months.

A secular separatist Tuareg, National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad,  wants an independent state in northern Mali called Azawad. National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad. The group which once controlled the cities of Gao and Kidal has largely melted back into the population awaiting its next chance. The MNLA is generally disregarded and underestimated because it has receded and allowed al-Qaeda-linked groups to take over the field. But it's important to remember the genesis of this crisis was an action by the MNLA to take over northern Mali, and all that is happening can be seen as a kind of reaction. The aspirations of the MNLA are deep-rooted going back to the first Tuareg rebellion in 1963. Their demands are not going to go away and those demands will continue to be the deep root of the northern Mali crisis.

National Front for the Liberation of Azawad is an Arab group loosely allied to the MNLA which wants the people of northern Mali to have the right to self-determination. They want northern Malians to be able to decide whether they want to be autonomous, independent or to be a part of Mali, possibly through a referendum similar to what happened when Southern Sudan voted for independence. The FLNA is not asking for the implementation of Sharia law.

Ganda Koy (Masters of the Earth) is a Songhai ethnic self-protection militia which has been around since the second Tuareg rebellion in the 1990s. Ganda Koy has in the past fought alongside the Malian Army against Tuareg rebels. They have allegedly committed massacres against Tuareg civilians. Human Rights Watch recently put out a report warning that ethnic self-protection militias like Ganda Koy and Ganda Izo are compiling kill lists of members of MNLA, Ansar al Din, other groups and their collaborators.

Ganda Izo is a Fulani ethnic militia that was formed in 2008 to perform a similar function to Ganda Koy—providing self-protection to the local Fulani populace and countering Tuareg rebellion.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is a mostly Algerian and Mauritanian group that has been present in northern Mali since 2003 and which has kidnapped and held more than 50 European and Canadian hostages for ransom in the last ten years earning what is estimated to be well over $100m. Niger's foreign minister Mohamed Bazoum recently said that AQIM's presence in northern Mali was part of a deal between the group and the deposed President of Mali Amadou Toumani Toure. Hostage ransom money from European governments was allegedly spread around to Malian officials while AQIM was given free rein in Tuareg areas, with a wink and a nod from the Malian Army. AQIM is currently holding at least nine European hostages in northern Mali. Over the last decade a few local Ifoghas, Tuaregs and Arabs joined AQIM in Mali, and their members also inter-married with the community. However now that AQIM are openly circulating in the main cities of northern Mali, and thanks to its association with local groups like Ansar al Din, the group has become more mainstream. Now youths from southern Mali, Senegal, Niger and other countries have come to join them under the rubric of the Islamic Police which AQIM has a direct hand in running.

Ansar al Din is a group of local Ifoghas Tuaregs, Berabiche Arabs and other local ethnic groups who want Sharia law implemented everywhere in Mali and across the Muslim world. The founder and head of Ansar al Din is Iyad Ag Ghali, a Tuareg former leader from the 1990s. Over the past ten years Iyad worked closely with the former president to try and put an end to simmering Tuareg rebellions and to negotiate hostage ransom deals with AQIM. Ansar al Din's spokesman is an Arab from the Timbuktu area named Sanda Ould Boumana who was incarcerated in Mauritania in 2005 for being an alleged member of al-Qaeda. The majority of Ansar al Din fighters are Tuaregs from Iyad Ag Ghali’s Ifoghas tribe and Berabiche Arabs from the Timbuktu area. Ansar al Din avoids fights with the MNLA and FLNA so as not to shed blood of relatives and tribal cohorts which would be de-legitimising. They tend to leave that job to MUJAO and AQIM. Although Ansar al Din denies any links with al-Qaeda, it effectively functions as a local umbrella under which members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) can operate. The relationship between the two groups is analogous to the association between the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghainstan, with Ansar al Din playing host. The two groups work together running the religious police, for example. Ansar al Din keeps its membership Malian, thus keeping their future options open within Mali. Ansar al Din can be found in all three main cities of the north: Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal.

Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa is the most opaque of the al-Qaeda-linked groups in northern Mali. It is supposedly a dissident group which split off from AQIM, but they told Al Jazeera that they're proud of working with AQIM in Gao to fend-off mutual enemies. MUJAO says like Ansar al Din that they want Sharia law everywhere in the world. Unlike Ansar al Din the group incorporates both locals and foreigners from the Sahel region and North Africa.  MUJAO has been the most aggressive in attacking MNLA elements as well as Arab groups who want self-determination for northern Mali. When the MNLA gain a foothold in a region, MUJAO are known to harrass them until they leave. Tilemsi Arab drug lords from the Gao area are alleged to be involved in funding MUJAO and some of their young people have joined.

The trade routes of the Sahara once made the region now called Mali among the world’s richest. But for the past century, it has been marred by instability and conflict.

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