Pentagon Prepares Invasion of Mali

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
December 6, 2012

The Pentagon is currently organizing, training and arming an “international” military force to intervene in Mali next year, according to Pentagon and State Department officialdom.

The mercenary force will be led on the ground by Malian and West African troops. Details on the effort emerged in a Senate hearing Wednesday, according to the Washington Post.

Sen. Christopher A. Coons calls for intervention in Mali to combat al-Qaeda.

Amanda J. Dory, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for Africa, said no U.S. troops would be involved in the intervention but said it is likely U.S. warplanes will be used to transport African troops and provide them with air cover.

During the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa hearing, Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) called northern Mali “the largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world.”

United Nations Calls for Invasion of Africa

In order to lend an international ambiance to the planned invasion, the UN Security Council on Wednesday ordered sanctions against The Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, said to be a splinter group of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

On Thursday, the New York Times reported:

In late November, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, recommended that the Security Council endorse a plan by the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States to deploy a security force at the request of the Mali government to reclaim the north from the extremists.

In addition to being described as drug dealers, the group is said to “have implemented strict Shariah principles in the area including the amputations of hands of thieves and stoning of couples involved in sexual activities,” according to The News Tribe.

Move On Africa Devised During Bush Era

In July, we reported that Africom was given the green light during the Bush years to move into Zambia, Gabon, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Tunisia, and Uganda.

The Kony 2012 propaganda blitz earlier this year coincided with the increased focus on Africa and dovetailed with subsequent coverage by the establishment media of al-Qaeda supposedly expanding operations on the strategic, resource rich continent.

“Many in the West fear that northeast Mali and the arid Sahel region could become the new Afghanistan, a no-man’s-land where extremists can train, impose hardline Islamic law and plot terror attacks abroad,” the Telegraph reported in October.

U.S. officials, however, admit the rag-tag group is incapable of launching attacks outside of Mali and some “independent analysts have questioned whether the administration’s strategy could backfire by embroiling the United States in an intractable local conflict,” the Post reports.

Islamic Radicals Armed with Gaddafi’s Looted Arsenal

The al-Qaeda rebels suddenly appeared on the scene in April. “The rebels, armed with weapons stolen from Muammar Gaddafi’s formidable arsenal, took over an area of the Sahara as big as France in an astonishing 72 hours, taking advantage of the chaotic aftermath of an army coup,” Nick Meo wrote for the Independent.

“Their core was formed by a group of Malian Tuareg soldiers who had been part of Colonel Gaddafi’s army for years, and in some cases decades. Last summer they realized that he was doomed and deserted his army, with large amounts of his weapons which they secretly transported across the desert to Mali,” Meo writes.

AQIM proudly admits they were allowed to gain possession of Gaddafi’s weapons. “We have been one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions in the Arab world,” AQIM leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar told the Mauritanian news agency ANI in November, 2011. “As for our benefiting from the [Libyan] weapons, this is a natural thing in these kinds of circumstances.”

Pentagon and NATO Repeatedly Arm al-Qaeda

Following the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi, it was learned that the Obama administration “secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats,” the New York Times reported on December 5.

The New York Times reported in October that most of the weapons “shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists,” in other words, al-Qaeda.

We are expected to believe these arms transfers to the people the U.S. government claims it is fighting against are little more than happenstance and accidental. In fact, the pattern of arming our supposed enemies was established in Afghanistan back in the 1980s when the CIA armed the Afghan mujahideen that ultimately became the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

This article was posted: Thursday, December 6, 2012 at 1:19 pm

Tags: foreign affairs, terrorism, war

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