Some of the residents of northern Mali are rebelling against the Islamists who gained control of the region after a military coup ousted President Amadou Toumani Touré last March.

Some of the rebels are protesters who blocked the Islamists from praying in a local mosque, and some are machete and stick-welding youths in Timbuktu, while others are haphazard militias of men and a few women training in hand-to-hand combat near Mopti. All of them are armed with little more than the desire to rid their country of the Islamists who have terrorized them with public whippings, stonings, and amputations.

And it is these militias that have gained the support of the Malian army. According to the New York Times, the army is feeding, instructing and sheltering them on abandoned state lands.

The army itself seems unable or unwilling to engage the Islamists, preferring instead to deal with the issues plaguing its capitol, Bamako.

The military, angry at the government’s handling of the Taureg rebellion in the north, staged a coup in March, which overthrew President Touré and ended years of democratic rule. The Tauregs (the historical inhabitants of northern Mali) gained control of the north just after the coup.

Facing international pressure, the military handed control of the country back to a civilian government lead by interim president Dioncounda Traoré and interim prime minister Cheick Modibo Diarra. Analysts believe that the military is still in control of the government.

In May, protesters stormed the presidential palace and beat Traoré unconscious. He spent the next two months recovering in Paris and returned to Mali in July.

Since the coup, Bamako has become a city of repression. According to UN reports and the New York Times, there have been attacks on journalists and soldiers suspected of opposing the military. They have been tortured and some have been made to “disappear.”

And in the north, the Islamists have forced the Tauregs to retreat, taking control of a region the size of Texas, displacing 435,000 people.

While the military seems to be pulling the governmental strings, it also has had to contend with dissension in the general population and its own ranks, which has left it little energy to deal with the Islamists.

Regionally, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is willing to send 3,000 troops to help Mali take back their northern territory. They are awaiting approval from the UN and Bamako. However, part of those troops would be used to help stabilize the Malian government, something the Defense Minister, Yamoussa Camara, has refused to accept. Camara told Channel 4 News’s Lindsey Hilsum that international troops would only be welcome to “liberate the north of the country, not to secure the institutions in Bamako.”

In the meantime, according to the UN News Centre, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has asked the UN Security council to impose financial and travel restrictions “against individuals or groups in Mali engaged in terrorist, religious extremist or criminal activities.”

As for the militia leaders, many of whom are veterans of past guerilla wars, they say they cannot wait for regional and international intervention. “The enemy is implanting itself. We’re in a hurry, totally in a hurry,” Amadou Mallé, director of training for the Liberation Forces for the Northern Regions (FLN), told the New York Times.

So, who are the Islamists?

According to Michael Lambert, director of the African Studies Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Jason Warner, a Ph.D. student in African Studies and Government at Harvard University, there are four groups controlling northern Mali: Ansar Dine, MNLA (not Islamist), MUJAO and AQIM. Lambert and Warner summarized the history and goals of each group for CNN.

According to Lambert and Warner, Ansar Dine has control of three major northern cities: Kidal, Timbuktu and Gao. Ansar Dine is a homegrown, but still international, group lead by Iyad Ag Ghaly. It may be backed financially by Qatar and its members are said to come from Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Algeria. Their main goal is to spread Sharia throughout Mali. They can be hard to pin down because they have shifting allegiances with the other groups and the Malian Army. It is this group that is responsible for the destruction of World Heritage Sites within Mali.

The second Islamist group and ally to Ansar Dine AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). AQIM also has ties to South American drug traffickers who use West Africa as a path to Europe.

MUJAO (Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa) is an ally to Ansar Dine and is an offshoot of AQIM. In their analysis, Lambert and Warner said the stated goal of MUJAO is to provide material and military support for those Muslims, especially the young, who wish to “raise the banner of Islam.” This group is said to be liked by the residents of the towns they occupy because they provide services that neither the MNLA nor the Malian government do. The group is condemned by others for recruiting children. Their membership is drawn from across West Africa.

The MNLA (the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) are primarily Tuaregs who want a secular statehood. According to reports, the MNLA ended their alliance with Ansar Dine when the group implemented Sharia.

Despite the grim outlook, the leaders of the militias are confident. “I’m going to use my very few means, to get out in front of the army,” said Ibrahim Issa Diallo, self-proclaimed military chief of Gando Iso, told the New York Times. “Our goal is to liberate the north, whatever the price.”

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Washington, U.S.A. – An experts panel hosted by the Carnegie Endowment and Atlantic Council warned that al-Qaeda terrorists are consolidating their position in northern Mali — buoyed by drug-trafficking, kidnapping ransoms, Libyan arms, and an influx of extremists. As the international community deliberates next steps on the Mali ”meltdown,” analysts worry about the spread of an Arc of Instability across Africa’s Sahel.

“Terrorists are consolidating their position by the day in northern Mali and the international community just talks,” said Maman Sidikou, Niger’s Ambassador to the US. He cited the influx of Libyan arms, kidnappings, and control by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) of drug-smuggling routes. “Al-Qaeda has the resources, arms, and ideology to turn young people’s minds. They are the driving force.” Why would international leaders “wait while this turns into another Afghanistan?”

For Western aid-workers, Rossella Urru of Italy and Ainhoa Fernandez de Rincon and Enric Gonyacons of Spain, it was day 222 of captivity since their Oct. 23 kidnapping from a Polisario-run refugee camp near Tindouf in Algeria, reportedly assisted by camp-insiders. They are believed held in northern Mali by an al-Qaeda offshoot, Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), that threatens to kill one of them if its ransom demands aren’t met. More than half of Westerners kidnapped in Africa are now held in northern Mali, news reports indicate.

“Northern Mali is turning into a Star Wars bar of extremists from across the region,” said Dr. J. Peter Pham, Director, Atlantic Council’s Ansari Africa Center. “The last thing Africa needs right now is another Failed State” attracting bad actors.”  He added that “pragmatism” holds together the ideologically diverse groups now in control — Tuareg-led separatists, Ansar Dine Islamists, AQIM, and MUJAO.

“The meltdown in the north came in conjunction with the coup in the south,” said Anouar Boukhars, co-leader of Carnegie’s Mauritania working group and assistant professor, McDaniel College. He and panelist Rudolph Atallah, senior fellow, Atlantic Council, outlined the complex history that provided the “ingredients for the conflagration.”

Al-Qaeda’s consolidation in northern Mali underscores growing volatility across Africa’s Sahel.Multiple reports are linking instability in the region to other militants and groups in the Maghreb and Sahel, including members from the Polisario-run camps.

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For years, women world-wide have been fighting for their rights and to have equality with their male counterparts. While some nations have progressed much more rapidly for the equality of women, other nations are still struggling to give women the rights and freedom that men have.

According to the dailybeast.com, “in the last year, Denmark elected a female prime minister, Brazil elected a female president and a female took the helm of the International Monetary Fund. In the last decade, Ethiopia passed the most progressive abortion laws in Africa to combat unsafe abortion rates and Mali passed a law that says women are not required to obey their husbands.

It seems the state of women’s rights and freedoms worldwide are perhaps better than ever before. But, large and sobering discrepancies remain. Women aren’t allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, are subject to genital mutilation in Mali and are killed for honor in Pakistan.”

Another country, which is considered one of the worst to live in for women, is Turkey. Their rights are extremely limited. But for Turkish women, things might start looking up for those who have succumbed to inequality for decades. According to the United Press International (UPI), “the European Parliament (EP) recently adopted a report urging Turkey to follow up on its recent work toward securing gender equality and women’s rights.”

The report, written by Socialists & Democrats Member of European Parliament Emine Bozkurt, lays out a series of goals for Ankara, Turkey’s capitol, to accomplish by 2020 in raising the status of women to fully equal members of Turkish society as Brussels and Ankara seek to breathe life into the country’s stalled European Union (EU) accession bid.

Bozkurt, the EP’s rapporteur on women’s rights in Turkey, discussed the passage of the report and named it, “A 2020 Perspective for Women in Turkey” which is meant to ensure that the European Commission keeps the issue of women’s rights and domestic violence in the forefront of its efforts to promote a “positive agenda.” Also, the report “stresses that there can be no democracy without women and that women should be treated as individuals rather than just as family members or as mothers.”

While ministries are working toward gender equality in Turkey, many problems remain.

According to the report, Turkey’s new law against domestic violence “lacks a mechanism which immediately removes [alleged perpetrators] from the vicinity of the woman who has been subjected to violence.” Stefan Fule, the European Commissioner for Enlargement, believes Turkey still has a long way to go and that several inequalities still need to be addressed.

Fule says, “On women’s rights, every step needs to be taken to implement the recent law on violence against women, also, to improve the situation on the ground of women in Turkey as regards education, employment and political representation.”

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Geneva, Switzerland – Despite major security constraints, the ICRC and the Mali Red Cross continue to help people affected by armed violence in northern Mali.

Jürg Eglin heads the ICRC’s regional delegation for Mali and Niger. “Access to health care, food and water is as difficult as ever in this region where food is short,” he explains. People are still having trouble getting hold of water in Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal.

“On 21 April, a Mali Red Cross convoy was able to deliver food and medicines to Timbuktu Hospital,” continued Mr Eglin. “We absolutely have to get access to the people affected by the violence, but we don’t yet have the security guarantees we need before launching a larger-scale humanitarian operation.”

The context is unstable and complex. The ICRC is currently ensuring that all parties understand and accept the neutral, independent, humanitarian work of the ICRC and the Mali Red Cross. It will only be possible to fully meet the huge needs in this region if the parties involved accept this role and give solid security guarantees.

Since 13 April, the ICRC has:

• sent a convoy from Niamey in Niger (on 17 April) that delivered medicines and medical supplies to Gao Hospital, enabling the
hospital to treat between 300 and 500 sick patients and around 100 casualties of the fighting;

• made an ICRC nurse and an ICRC midwife available to the medical team at Gao Hospital;

• delivered medicines to the main health centre in Ansongo, south of Gao, to help the centre resume its work;

• sent a surgeon and a doctor to the areas of Gao and Timbuktu, to treat people injured in the fighting;

• supplied some 5,000 litres of fuel per day to keep the water system in the town of Gao operating and prevent water shortages;

• sent a team to identify the most urgent needs in Kidal.

The ICRC is maintaining smaller teams than usual in Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu, so that it can continue operations in northern Mali. The organization has just opened an office in Mopti and is still operating in Bamako, the Malian capital. Finally, the ICRC is helping Malian refugees in Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Niger.

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As the situation worsens in the Sahel, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is appealing for 12.3 million Swiss francs (about 10 million euros) in order to bring aid to some 700,000 people in Mali and Niger and thereby help forestall a major humanitarian crisis in the two countries.

“People in Mali and Niger are facing a twofold crisis: the food insecurity that has afflicted the entire region, and the fighting in the north of Mali that is driving massive displacement,” said Boris Michel, the ICRC’s head of operations for North and West Africa.

The armed confrontations that have occurred in northern Mali in recent weeks have forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes in utter destitution and to seek refuge either within Mali, as at least 60,000 people have done, or in neighbouring countries. Those who have fled to Niger are concentrated in the northern Tillabéry region, one of the areas hardest hit by the food crisis and the scene of recent inter-community violence.

“The fighting has resulted in casualties. In addition, people have been taken captive and families have been dispersed,” said Mr Michel. The ICRC’s priorities are to visit people detained in connection with the fighting and to provide care for the wounded either directly, through the Mali Red Cross or by supporting health-care facilities.

“We also plan to continue to provide aid for displaced people,” added Mr Michel. “We are preparing to distribute food to 84,000 people and emergency supplies to around 60,000. Shelter, clean drinking water, hygiene items and health care will also be made available as needed.”

The fighting in northern Mali is further straining a part of the Sahel already hard hit by a lack of rainfall and by recurrent food crises. “The shortfall in agricultural production and the lack of feed for the livestock are affecting countless families of farmers and herders in Mali and Niger,” said Mr Michel. “Some of them were never able to recover from the effects of the crisis of two years ago. Their situation is particularly difficult.”

The aid that the ICRC plans to provide is intended for people in the Kidal, Gao and Tombouctou areas in the north of Mali, and in the Tillabéry and Agadez areas of Niger. “What we are striving to achieve is not only to save lives but also to provide support for the people’s own resilience,” said Mr Michel.

Accordingly, the plan includes distributing food to over 240,000 people, buying livestock at a reasonable price to preserve the livelihood of 120,000 nomads, and distributing seed to increase the productive capacity of 90,000 farmers. The funds requested will be additional to the 22.3 million Swiss francs (approximately 18.3 million euros) initially budgeted for 2012.

In addition to the emergency actions it is taking in Mali and Niger, the ICRC conducts longer-term activities in the two countries, in particular to help detainees and to improve economic security, access to water and health care. The ICRC has been performing its humanitarian tasks in the region in close cooperation with the Mali Red Cross and the Red Cross Society of Niger since 2009.

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