Sahara

The situation along the demarcation line that separates Islamist-held northern Mali from the south of the country is agonizingly confusing. The Malian army claim to have recaptured the strategic town of Douentza, while the Islamist claim the complete opposite. How can we look through the sandstorm that surrounds the current Islamist advance south...
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Ansar ud-Dine speak up...at last! The Touareg lead mujahedeen group currently controlling large tracts of northern Mali have finally posted their 'Political Platform', on their website. It's one of the most illuminating and troubling documents that I've read so far during this entire crisis.
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The black salafist flag that flutters in the hot desert breeze over Timbuktu symbolises the abject failure of western policy in the Sahel over the past decade or more. Many millions of dollars and euros that have been spent by the US, France and the EU to train the armies of Mali, Niger and...
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Tweet A few days ago, the pro-Azawad website Toumast Press reported that Algerian army personnel were in Gao training fighters belonging to Ansar ud-Dine and MUJAO,  the Islamist militia who recently drove the Touareg separatist  MNLA from the city.  They also reported that the Algerians have been sending heavy weaponry to the city under...
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Tweet I’m hearing a steady stream of reports that Mokhtar Belmokthar, ala Laouaar (‘The One Eyed’), one of the supreme leaders of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), has been killed in Gao, during bitter street fighting between the National Movement of the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA) and the AQIM offshoots the Movement...
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A few days ago, on Friday March 23rd, I managed to reach an MNLA fighter called Intarhia on his satellite phone. When I called, he was in a 4x4 that was being driven across open desert, seemingly at top speed going by the incessant roar that formed a trying backdrop to our conversation....
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They say that takamba has its origins in a neighbourhood of the same name situated on the edge of the small town of Témera, up-river north of Gao, on the road to Bourem. Its driving force is the unmistakable takamba rhythm which pulses on the boom and bip before lurching at the end of...
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Gaddafi has been buying the affections and fighting skills of the nomadic tribes of the Sahara for a long time. His vision of a borderless Islamic republic of the Sahara, struck a chord with the Touareg who have been fighting their own rebellion against the governments of Mali and Niger since independence back in...
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The word ‘nomad’ might make us dream about freedom, but in the southern Sahara it actually describes a man locked in a pitiless and epic struggle against drought, locusts and oblivion. The scrubland of the Azawak, an immense and table-flat plain in the northwestern corner of Niger, is home to two nomadic peoples,...
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Tweet I just learned that Rhissa Ag Ogham, one time guitarist  and singer with the Touareg group Terakaft, died in a car accident a week ago.   Apparently he was driving back to Tamanrasset from Libya with his father, who also died in the accident.  Rhissa toured Europe with Terakaft back in 2007 and 2008,...
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