Full length journalistic features
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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Like the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and Eminem, Danyel Waro has taken a style of music that wasn’t his by birthright and fashioned it into something new. But Waro’s whole point is that, thanks to the island’s unique blurring of racial and cultural dividing line, this music is in fact his own. It is...
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When the record producer Nick Gold traveled to Cuba in the early 1990s and fell in love with a cassette by the late great Ñico Saquito, the Afro Cuban story was already old, very old. Gold, who was already infatuated with Malian music, had the genius to perceive and appreciate the well-spring of...
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It took a rapper to light a firecracker and lob it at Tunisia’s youth, whose frustration had been distilled into liquid hydrogen by years of government corruption, nepotism, ineptitude and general state imposed joylessness.
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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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Yabous Productions, the non-profit Palestinian organisation behind the Jerusalem festival, has been organizing cultural events in Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1995. After the second intifada started in 2001, they were one of the few cultural organisations in Palestine to survive the Israeli crackdown. Their small offices in Arabic East Jerusalem buzz with...
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