My new book MUSIC, CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI takes an in-depth look at the crisis that overtook Mali in January 2012 and lead to a ten-month occupation of the northern two-thirds of the country by armed jihadi groups. The book examines the roots of those tumultuous events and their ef- fect on...
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BOOK EXTRACT: “Tisrawt is a microcosm of Touareg society,” Melissa explains. “That’s to say, it is a group of people who come from many different clans. Some are pro-MNLA. Some are pro Ansar ud-Dine. Some are pro-Mali. Others say that it’s all nonsense. And the aim is to understand each other, to live...
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BOOK EXTRACT: In important ways, the scenes of vandalism and destruction that were played out in Timbuktu following the Salafist takeover in April 2012 weren’t new at all. There was something very old about them. Mostly white Arabic or Hassaniya speaking men from the northern deserts were ‘teaching’ the blacks how to worship...
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BOOK EXTRACT: Life in the early 1990s was convivial. There was music. Women felt free to come and go. Some people smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol. The bonds between those young Touareg, their music and their culture seemed strong and unbreakable. No one quite knows why some senior Touareg figures from the northeast,...
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BOOK EXTRACT: In Gao, a group of teenagers sat around a ghetto blaster listening to Bob Marley. A Landcruiser pick-up loaded with tooled-up Islamic police came by and seeing the reggae fans, stopped and accosted them. “This music is haram!” – forbidden by Islamic law – said one of the MUJAO men as...
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The conversation won’t be easy. But listen to the spirits there in the music and they’ll tell you a deeper tale. They’ll tell you that in that vast desert which outsiders are content to call a wasteland, good for nothing except for the oil, phosphates and uranium that lie under its soil, there exists...
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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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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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