France has said its final troops have left Mali, completing a withdrawal that ends a nine-year operation in the country at the centre of the Sahel region’s spiralling security crisis.
In a statement, the French army said on Monday it had met the “major military logistics challenge” of the pullout “in an orderly and safe fashion”.
The withdrawal comes amid tanking relations between Paris and Bamako, which has increasingly turned to Russia to respond to armed groups linked to ISIS (ISIL) and al-Qaeda who have expanded their reach while jockeying for control in the country’s sprawling central region.
“Today the final contingent of the Barkhane force still on Malian territory crossed the border between Mali and Niger,” the French military statement said, using the official name of the main French operation in the region, which was launched with the cooperation of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger in 2014 as armed groups became increasingly active in Mali’s arid centre.
France had initially intervened in the country at the request of Bamako in 2013 to respond to an offensive by the ethnic-Tuareg separatist movement.
Credit: Aljazeera.com
