Al Qaeda No. 2 killed in drone strike: U.S. official
Abu Yahya al-Libi, one of al
Qaeda's top strategists and seen as the most prominent figure in the
network after leader Ayman al Zawahri, in an undated photo.
REUTERS/State Department
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In what U.S. officials described as major blow to al Qaeda, the group's second-ranking leader, a militant known as Abu Yahya al-Libi, was killed in a strike by a missile fired from a U.S.-operated drone, an official confirmed Tuesday.
The official said the Libyan-born Libi, a cleric whose real name was Mohamed Hassan Qaid,
was killed in a drone strike early morning Monday, Pakistan time. The
drone-launched missile was targeted at a suspected militant hideout in
Hesokhel, a village in North Waziristan, a tribal region in Pakistan along its border with Afghanistan.U.S. officials said that Libi, who had appeared in al Qaeda propaganda videos and once escaped from an a U.S.-operated prison in Afghanistan, was a key figure in what remained of the core al Qaeda network founded by Osama bin Laden, who was killed last year in a U.S. commando raid on his hideout near a Pakistani military academy.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
In the wake of bin Laden's death, officials said, Ayman al Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor who had been bin Laden's long-time deputy, became the leader of al Qaeda's core group, advised and assisted by a small coterie of veteran militants. U.S. officials said Libi had recently emerged as Zawahri's principal deputy.
"Abu Yahya was among al Qaeda's most experienced and versatile leaders - operational trainer and Central Shura head - and played a critical role in the group's planning against the West, providing oversight of the external operations efforts," one official said.
Zawahri "will be hard-pressed to find any one person who can readily step into Abu Yahya's shoes - in addition to his gravitas as a longstanding member of AQ's leadership, Abu Yahya's religious credentials gave him the authority to issue fatwas, operational approvals, and guidance to the core group in Pakistan and regional affiliates," the official added. "There is no one who even comes close in terms of replacing the expertise AQ has just lost."
U.S. officials waited more than 24 hours before spreading word that they were confident Libi had been killed. In addition to his escape, along with three other militants, from U.S. custody in 2005, he at least once had been reported, prematurely, to have been killed in a U.S. drone strike.
The officials declined to say why they were so confident that Libi was now dead.
(Editing By Warren Strobel and Paul Simao)
Pakistan conveys "serious concern" over U.S. drone strikes
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan on Tuesday summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires to the foreign ministry to convey its "serious concerns" over drone strikes, a ministry statement said, a move that could further escalate tensions between the allies.
The move came after Pakistani intelligence officials said that a U.S. drone strike may have killed an al Qaeda leader, Abu Yahya al-Libi,
in Pakistan's northwest. Drone attacks are a major sticking point in
talks aimed at improving ties between Washington and Islamabad.(Writing by Qasim Nauman; Editing by Ron Popeski)
Pakistan Taliban leader says Libi death a "big loss"
PESHAWAR (Reuters) - A senior Pakistani Taliban leader said on Tuesday that the death of al Qaeda's number two, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a drone strike in northwest Pakistan was a "big loss".
"After Doctor Sahib (al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri), he was the main al Qaeda leader," the Pakistani Taliban leader, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.(Reporting by Jibran Ahmad; Writing by Michael Georgy)
Yemeni troops, tanks advance on al Qaeda-held town
ADEN/SANAA
(Reuters) - Hundreds of Yemeni troops backed by tanks advanced in a bid
to retake a coastal town from al Qaeda-linked fighters on Monday,
residents said, part of a U.S.-backed offensive in a country Washington
sees as a frontline against Islamist militants.
"They are getting ready to fight," one resident, who
declined to be named, told Reuters by telephone. Via text message, the
head of the southern military zone asked people living in the area not
to use the roads around Shaqra and two other towns controlled by
militants.
Shaqra lies on Yemen's southern coast, along a major shipping route that is also the gateway for Somalis entering the country to fight alongside militants.
The United States and its Gulf allies are alarmed by deteriorating security in Yemen, where al Qaeda-linked militants gained a foothold during a popular uprising against former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
While Saleh grappled with the protests that eventually toppled him, militants went on a rampage in the southern province of Abyan, gunning down officials, looting ammunition depots, and for the first time in history, seizing territory.
The United States, which helped engineer Saleh's replacement by his deputy in February, is backing the offensive in the south and has stepped up its campaign of drone strike assassinations of alleged al Qaeda members who it says plot attacks from Yemen.
It has also sent dozens of military trainers and stepped up aid to Yemen where it wants President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to reunify the military and focus on driving militants from their strongholds in Abyan.
Yemeni troops have moved into the centre of Zinjibar, capital of Abyan province, where they fought militants on Sunday. They also clashed with Islamist fighters near the town of Jaar, some 30 km (20 miles) to the north.
"LIKE A PLAGUE"
Meanwhile, two suicide bombers targeting an army checkpoint in Lawdar, another town in Abyan, killed four people and wounded another, said the Defense Ministry. The bombers, one of whom was dressed as a woman, were also killed.
"The attack was targeting Colonel Mohammed Batreeh, the head of military intelligence in Abyan province," a local official told Reuters. "He survived, but the innocent people were the ones who got killed."
A third suicide bomber struck in the same place later on, blowing himself up when volunteer pro-government fighters told him to surrender.
Militants retreated last month from the town of Lawdar, also in Abyan, after encountering stiff resistance from fighters who have arranged themselves into popular committees to defend their land.
"Getting rid of those (Islamist fighters) needs time. They are like a plague," said Abu Saada, a tribesman fighting alongside the army in Abyan.
While fighting raged in the south, at least 34 people were killed in clashes overnight between Sunni Muslim Salafis and Houthi Shi'ite rebels in northern Yemen.
The Houthis have exploited political upheaval in Yemen to carve out their own state within a state in the rugged northern province of Saada, on the border with Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter.
Saudi Arabia, wary of the rising regional power of Shi'ite Iran and grappling with its own Shi'ite unrest in eastern provinces, fought the Houthis in northern Yemen in 2009.
The U.S. envoy to Yemen said earlier this year there were signs that Shi'ite Iran was becoming more active in the country, posing a threat to its security and stability. Iran denies interfering in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia, a major regional U.S. ally, says Iran is fomenting unrest among its own Shi'ites in its eastern provinces and in neighboring Sunni-led Bahrain.
A spokesman for the Salafis - who see Shi'ites as heretics and espouse a puritanical creed with many followers in Saudi Arabia - said Houthi fighters attacked them on Sunday night in the Kataf area of the northern Saada province.
"We have regained control of a mountain site in the al-Damaj area after heavy clashes with the Houthis during which 18 of the attackers were killed along with 16 of ours," the spokesman told Reuters on Monday. Dozens were wounded in the clashes, he said.
(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari in Sanaa and Mohammed Mukhashaf in Aden; Writing by Rania El Gamal; Editing by Jon Hemming and Ralph Gowling)
Shaqra lies on Yemen's southern coast, along a major shipping route that is also the gateway for Somalis entering the country to fight alongside militants.
The United States and its Gulf allies are alarmed by deteriorating security in Yemen, where al Qaeda-linked militants gained a foothold during a popular uprising against former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
While Saleh grappled with the protests that eventually toppled him, militants went on a rampage in the southern province of Abyan, gunning down officials, looting ammunition depots, and for the first time in history, seizing territory.
The United States, which helped engineer Saleh's replacement by his deputy in February, is backing the offensive in the south and has stepped up its campaign of drone strike assassinations of alleged al Qaeda members who it says plot attacks from Yemen.
It has also sent dozens of military trainers and stepped up aid to Yemen where it wants President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to reunify the military and focus on driving militants from their strongholds in Abyan.
Yemeni troops have moved into the centre of Zinjibar, capital of Abyan province, where they fought militants on Sunday. They also clashed with Islamist fighters near the town of Jaar, some 30 km (20 miles) to the north.
"LIKE A PLAGUE"
Meanwhile, two suicide bombers targeting an army checkpoint in Lawdar, another town in Abyan, killed four people and wounded another, said the Defense Ministry. The bombers, one of whom was dressed as a woman, were also killed.
"The attack was targeting Colonel Mohammed Batreeh, the head of military intelligence in Abyan province," a local official told Reuters. "He survived, but the innocent people were the ones who got killed."
A third suicide bomber struck in the same place later on, blowing himself up when volunteer pro-government fighters told him to surrender.
Militants retreated last month from the town of Lawdar, also in Abyan, after encountering stiff resistance from fighters who have arranged themselves into popular committees to defend their land.
"Getting rid of those (Islamist fighters) needs time. They are like a plague," said Abu Saada, a tribesman fighting alongside the army in Abyan.
While fighting raged in the south, at least 34 people were killed in clashes overnight between Sunni Muslim Salafis and Houthi Shi'ite rebels in northern Yemen.
The Houthis have exploited political upheaval in Yemen to carve out their own state within a state in the rugged northern province of Saada, on the border with Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter.
Saudi Arabia, wary of the rising regional power of Shi'ite Iran and grappling with its own Shi'ite unrest in eastern provinces, fought the Houthis in northern Yemen in 2009.
The U.S. envoy to Yemen said earlier this year there were signs that Shi'ite Iran was becoming more active in the country, posing a threat to its security and stability. Iran denies interfering in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia, a major regional U.S. ally, says Iran is fomenting unrest among its own Shi'ites in its eastern provinces and in neighboring Sunni-led Bahrain.
A spokesman for the Salafis - who see Shi'ites as heretics and espouse a puritanical creed with many followers in Saudi Arabia - said Houthi fighters attacked them on Sunday night in the Kataf area of the northern Saada province.
"We have regained control of a mountain site in the al-Damaj area after heavy clashes with the Houthis during which 18 of the attackers were killed along with 16 of ours," the spokesman told Reuters on Monday. Dozens were wounded in the clashes, he said.
(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari in Sanaa and Mohammed Mukhashaf in Aden; Writing by Rania El Gamal; Editing by Jon Hemming and Ralph Gowling)
Mali: the world's next jihadi launchpad?
DAKAR (Reuters) - When Mali's
Tuareg nomads launched a rebellion in January, many in Africa thought
it would be just the latest in a long line of desert uprisings to be
swiftly placated with offers of cash and jobs.
Some optimists mused that the indigo-turbaned northerners might even take on the local arm of al Qaeda, which was plying a disruptive trade in Western hostages and trafficked goods.
But instead, the Tuaregs' struggle for an independent homeland has been hijacked by better-armed Islamists from Mali and abroad, creating a safe haven for militants in the Sahara that is already being compared to similar bastions elsewhere.
"We are in an early stage of Afghanistan and Somalia. There is no doubt in my mind," said Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, a Mauritanian diplomat who has been a United Nations envoy in both west Africa and Somalia.
Mali is still a long way from the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan of the 1990s from which Osama bin Laden's then little-known al Qaeda readied the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets in 2001.
And the desert trade in hostages, narcotics and other goods has yet to reach the scale of the piracy off the east coast of Somalia, estimated to cost the global economy $7 billion a year.
But Ould-Abdallah and a swelling chorus of security experts point to an influx of foreign fighters, a debilitating rivalry between neighbouring states, and steady flow of illicit funds as making Mali and the wider Saharan zone the next one to watch.
In former colonial power France, the new defence minister warned last week of a "west African Afghanistan" in Mali.
The rebels' seizure of three major airstrips in the north - near the towns of Gao, Timbuktu and Tessalit - means that, in the absence of a functioning Malian air force, they can ferry in everything from drugs and weapons to yet more foreign fighters.
While some believe the threat can be contained within the area, others think it will stretch further afield. Among the latter is the African Union, whose chairman last week called for the United Nations to back a regional force to intervene.
"All the way across Europe, there is growing concern," one Western diplomat working in the region told Reuters.
"We have to recognise that it cannot be contained in northern Mali or even west Africa."
"COOL PLACE FOR JIHADIS"
The Sahara, and the Sahel scrubland which skirts it to the south, had already been inching up the global security agenda in recent years as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a franchise of the militant network, became more active in the zone after a crackdown by authorities in Algeria, where AQIM has its roots.
The overspill of arms and fighters from last year's Libyan war into an already fragile neighbourhood added a new layer of insecurity even before the rebellion in northern Mali.
When Malian government troops were routed in early April, a variety of groups entered the fray, in many cases appearing openly in the main towns for the first time. They included men declaring loyalty to al Qaeda and to AQIM splinter groups like the little-known MUJWA, as well as some members of Nigeria's Islamist militant organisation Boko Haram.
"It has become a cool place for jihadis from the region," said one U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, adding that gunmen were also coming in to northern Mali from Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania.
Early developments in the rebellion focused on the secular National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), whose slick, European-based PR machine and Tuareg sympathisers hailed a series of small victories notched up against the army as they sought to carve a state they call Azawad out of the desert.
But the complex nature of the uprising emerged after a coup on March 22 in the Malian capital Bamako, far to the south, by soldiers angry at the government's failure to contain the revolt. Their coup, however, merely emboldened the rebels to make a lightning advance.
As rebel forces took major towns such as the ancient city of Timbuktu, it became clear that MNLA fighters were operating alongside a newly formed Islamist movement known as Ansar Dine, whose stated goal is to impose Islamic law, sharia, across Mali.
Ansar Dine is run by Iyad Ag Ghali - described in a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from as "northern Mali's undisputed power broker". In two decades navigating northern Mali's tribal and political circles, Ag Ghali led two previous Tuareg rebellions, had a stint as a diplomat in Saudi Arabia and, once back home, acted as an go-between in hostage bargains with al Qaeda cells.
Diplomats in Mali said Ag Ghali formed Ansar Dine, commonly translated as Defenders of Faith, last year after being rebuffed in separate efforts to head both the MNLA and his Ifoghas Tuareg clan: "He lost the tribal line. He lost the rebellion. What does he have left? Religion," said a diplomat based in Bamako.
POWER-SHARING DEAL
Alongside the MNLA, Ansar Dine has jointly controlled Mali's north for two months. It was initially welcomed by local people for restoring a semblance of order after three months of violence and disruption. But it is now facing increasing hostility to its efforts to impose sharia on populations with a long history of practising a more liberal style of Islam.
Girls and boys have been separated in schools. Residents have been whipped for drinking alcohol and smoking and hundreds took to the streets of the town of Gao to protest last month when Islamists there banned soccer and television.
Yet if imposing sharia has won Ag Ghali little popularity, it has been crucial in drawing him closer to AQIM, a group with which he was already familiar - literally, through family connections - and which he now needed for its firepower and the cash it had accumulated after years operating in the area.
Such has been the rapprochement that Ag Ghali is now understood to have an al Qaeda nom de guerre - Abu Fadhil.
"(Ag Ghali) is using religion, but his aim is political," said Mohamed Coulibaly of the Dawa movement, which preaches the same conservative form of Islam as that espoused by Ag Ghali but which rejects violence.
Ansar Dine and AQIM each number around 500 fighters, giving them a combined headcount roughly equal to that of the MNLA and substantial clout in an area the size of Spain with a population of little over a million.
Witnesses say the Islamists are better-resourced and more heavily armed than the Tuareg separatists, however, allowing them to shunt the MNLA aside and take effective control on their own of towns across northern Mali.
The government in the south is labouring with a fragile transition back to civilian rule after the March 22 coup and its army is still licking its wounds after the rebel advance, so Bamako is in no position to take back the north any time soon.
While the government rejects the MNLA's secession, there might have been scope for negotiations on easing poverty in the north that could have provided a platform for resolving the rift in the country. But the marginalisation of the secular MNLA by the Islamists makes even that degree of dialogue impossible.
The MNLA now appears to risk tearing itself apart over a proposed power-sharing deal in the north with Ansar Dine - with the latter saying sharia is a non-negotiable part of the deal even as it consolidates its positions on the ground.
FUMBLING DIPLOMACY
Prospects of a solution from outside are equally dim.
Niger, whose capital Niamey is closer to much of the rebel-run zone even than Bamako, is pushing for quick military action to crush the rebels. Yet Algeria, the region's biggest military power, seeks dialogue and is prickly about any suggestion of foreign forces operating in the Sahara.
Such divisions are not new. Sour ties between Algeria and Morocco and longstanding regional frustration with Mali for its perceived laxity in dealing with the security threat on its territory, have hamstrung Western efforts to coordinate a response to the growing AQIM menace to Western interests.
On May 11, in a closed-door U.N. Security Council debate, diplomacy gave way to criticism of the west African states' ECOWAS grouping. According to a U.N. report seen by Reuters, Germany and the United States urged the United Nations to play a bigger role - a move openly supported last week by the region's main former colonial power, France, and by the African Union.
But if calls are growing for U.N.-backed intervention, memories of the disastrous 1993 U.S. foray into Somalia and the difficulties of NATO's decade-old presence in Afghanistan have dampened appetites for putting Western troops on the ground.
While Paris has military bases in Senegal and Ivory Coast together with special forces deployed to the region, France and Washington are so far only ready to provide support roles to an potential African mission to suppress the revolt.
ECOWAS has said for weeks that it has a standby force of thousands ready to deploy to Mali but the mission is short of any clear planning and mandate. It is meant to be invited in by authorities in Bamako but wrangling there between politicians and soldiers who led the coup has blocked any coherent policy.
There are questions, too, over the effectiveness of a west African force, over the cost, put by one peacekeeping source at over $200 million, and on whether foreign troops might just further poison relations among Mali's rival groups.
Others suggest it is still not too late to use deep-running tribal ties to detach the MNLA separatists, and some Tuaregs who have joined Ansar Dine, from hardline and foreign Islamists in the hope of starting negotiations with those more ready to talk.
"If a force goes in now, before there have been any talks, it risks pushing the moderates towards the extremists," the Western diplomat in the region said.
However, Todd Moss, once a senior U.S. diplomat working on Africa and now vice-president at the Center for Global Development, said a protracted stalemate would make a military effort more likely - possibly relying primarily on Western air power rather than a regional force moving in on the ground.
"Not ECOWAS ... rather a French and US counter-terrorism campaign from the sky," Moss suggested. "Western policymakers will absolutely not allow a jihadist safe haven."
But instead, the Tuaregs' struggle for an independent homeland has been hijacked by better-armed Islamists from Mali and abroad, creating a safe haven for militants in the Sahara that is already being compared to similar bastions elsewhere.
"We are in an early stage of Afghanistan and Somalia. There is no doubt in my mind," said Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, a Mauritanian diplomat who has been a United Nations envoy in both west Africa and Somalia.
Mali is still a long way from the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan of the 1990s from which Osama bin Laden's then little-known al Qaeda readied the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets in 2001.
And the desert trade in hostages, narcotics and other goods has yet to reach the scale of the piracy off the east coast of Somalia, estimated to cost the global economy $7 billion a year.
But Ould-Abdallah and a swelling chorus of security experts point to an influx of foreign fighters, a debilitating rivalry between neighbouring states, and steady flow of illicit funds as making Mali and the wider Saharan zone the next one to watch.
In former colonial power France, the new defence minister warned last week of a "west African Afghanistan" in Mali.
The rebels' seizure of three major airstrips in the north - near the towns of Gao, Timbuktu and Tessalit - means that, in the absence of a functioning Malian air force, they can ferry in everything from drugs and weapons to yet more foreign fighters.
While some believe the threat can be contained within the area, others think it will stretch further afield. Among the latter is the African Union, whose chairman last week called for the United Nations to back a regional force to intervene.
"All the way across Europe, there is growing concern," one Western diplomat working in the region told Reuters.
"We have to recognise that it cannot be contained in northern Mali or even west Africa."
"COOL PLACE FOR JIHADIS"
The Sahara, and the Sahel scrubland which skirts it to the south, had already been inching up the global security agenda in recent years as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a franchise of the militant network, became more active in the zone after a crackdown by authorities in Algeria, where AQIM has its roots.
The overspill of arms and fighters from last year's Libyan war into an already fragile neighbourhood added a new layer of insecurity even before the rebellion in northern Mali.
When Malian government troops were routed in early April, a variety of groups entered the fray, in many cases appearing openly in the main towns for the first time. They included men declaring loyalty to al Qaeda and to AQIM splinter groups like the little-known MUJWA, as well as some members of Nigeria's Islamist militant organisation Boko Haram.
"It has become a cool place for jihadis from the region," said one U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, adding that gunmen were also coming in to northern Mali from Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania.
Early developments in the rebellion focused on the secular National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), whose slick, European-based PR machine and Tuareg sympathisers hailed a series of small victories notched up against the army as they sought to carve a state they call Azawad out of the desert.
But the complex nature of the uprising emerged after a coup on March 22 in the Malian capital Bamako, far to the south, by soldiers angry at the government's failure to contain the revolt. Their coup, however, merely emboldened the rebels to make a lightning advance.
As rebel forces took major towns such as the ancient city of Timbuktu, it became clear that MNLA fighters were operating alongside a newly formed Islamist movement known as Ansar Dine, whose stated goal is to impose Islamic law, sharia, across Mali.
Ansar Dine is run by Iyad Ag Ghali - described in a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from as "northern Mali's undisputed power broker". In two decades navigating northern Mali's tribal and political circles, Ag Ghali led two previous Tuareg rebellions, had a stint as a diplomat in Saudi Arabia and, once back home, acted as an go-between in hostage bargains with al Qaeda cells.
Diplomats in Mali said Ag Ghali formed Ansar Dine, commonly translated as Defenders of Faith, last year after being rebuffed in separate efforts to head both the MNLA and his Ifoghas Tuareg clan: "He lost the tribal line. He lost the rebellion. What does he have left? Religion," said a diplomat based in Bamako.
POWER-SHARING DEAL
Alongside the MNLA, Ansar Dine has jointly controlled Mali's north for two months. It was initially welcomed by local people for restoring a semblance of order after three months of violence and disruption. But it is now facing increasing hostility to its efforts to impose sharia on populations with a long history of practising a more liberal style of Islam.
Girls and boys have been separated in schools. Residents have been whipped for drinking alcohol and smoking and hundreds took to the streets of the town of Gao to protest last month when Islamists there banned soccer and television.
Yet if imposing sharia has won Ag Ghali little popularity, it has been crucial in drawing him closer to AQIM, a group with which he was already familiar - literally, through family connections - and which he now needed for its firepower and the cash it had accumulated after years operating in the area.
Such has been the rapprochement that Ag Ghali is now understood to have an al Qaeda nom de guerre - Abu Fadhil.
"(Ag Ghali) is using religion, but his aim is political," said Mohamed Coulibaly of the Dawa movement, which preaches the same conservative form of Islam as that espoused by Ag Ghali but which rejects violence.
Ansar Dine and AQIM each number around 500 fighters, giving them a combined headcount roughly equal to that of the MNLA and substantial clout in an area the size of Spain with a population of little over a million.
Witnesses say the Islamists are better-resourced and more heavily armed than the Tuareg separatists, however, allowing them to shunt the MNLA aside and take effective control on their own of towns across northern Mali.
The government in the south is labouring with a fragile transition back to civilian rule after the March 22 coup and its army is still licking its wounds after the rebel advance, so Bamako is in no position to take back the north any time soon.
While the government rejects the MNLA's secession, there might have been scope for negotiations on easing poverty in the north that could have provided a platform for resolving the rift in the country. But the marginalisation of the secular MNLA by the Islamists makes even that degree of dialogue impossible.
The MNLA now appears to risk tearing itself apart over a proposed power-sharing deal in the north with Ansar Dine - with the latter saying sharia is a non-negotiable part of the deal even as it consolidates its positions on the ground.
FUMBLING DIPLOMACY
Prospects of a solution from outside are equally dim.
Niger, whose capital Niamey is closer to much of the rebel-run zone even than Bamako, is pushing for quick military action to crush the rebels. Yet Algeria, the region's biggest military power, seeks dialogue and is prickly about any suggestion of foreign forces operating in the Sahara.
Such divisions are not new. Sour ties between Algeria and Morocco and longstanding regional frustration with Mali for its perceived laxity in dealing with the security threat on its territory, have hamstrung Western efforts to coordinate a response to the growing AQIM menace to Western interests.
On May 11, in a closed-door U.N. Security Council debate, diplomacy gave way to criticism of the west African states' ECOWAS grouping. According to a U.N. report seen by Reuters, Germany and the United States urged the United Nations to play a bigger role - a move openly supported last week by the region's main former colonial power, France, and by the African Union.
But if calls are growing for U.N.-backed intervention, memories of the disastrous 1993 U.S. foray into Somalia and the difficulties of NATO's decade-old presence in Afghanistan have dampened appetites for putting Western troops on the ground.
While Paris has military bases in Senegal and Ivory Coast together with special forces deployed to the region, France and Washington are so far only ready to provide support roles to an potential African mission to suppress the revolt.
ECOWAS has said for weeks that it has a standby force of thousands ready to deploy to Mali but the mission is short of any clear planning and mandate. It is meant to be invited in by authorities in Bamako but wrangling there between politicians and soldiers who led the coup has blocked any coherent policy.
There are questions, too, over the effectiveness of a west African force, over the cost, put by one peacekeeping source at over $200 million, and on whether foreign troops might just further poison relations among Mali's rival groups.
Others suggest it is still not too late to use deep-running tribal ties to detach the MNLA separatists, and some Tuaregs who have joined Ansar Dine, from hardline and foreign Islamists in the hope of starting negotiations with those more ready to talk.
"If a force goes in now, before there have been any talks, it risks pushing the moderates towards the extremists," the Western diplomat in the region said.
However, Todd Moss, once a senior U.S. diplomat working on Africa and now vice-president at the Center for Global Development, said a protracted stalemate would make a military effort more likely - possibly relying primarily on Western air power rather than a regional force moving in on the ground.
"Not ECOWAS ... rather a French and US counter-terrorism campaign from the sky," Moss suggested. "Western policymakers will absolutely not allow a jihadist safe haven."
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