Determined not to lose Mali to Islamist forces, France’s president Francois Hollande ordered a rapid deployment of air and ground forces in Mali to block well-armed and motivated fighters of the Ansar Dine movement led by the veteran Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghali from crossing the Niger river and marching on Bamako. Hostilities began with the seizure by Islamists of Konna, a pre-emptive strike against a French-led political-military build up in the region, whose explicit aim is to restore Malian sovereignty in the north, which was conquered last year when an alliance of Tuareg secessionists and Islamists loosely affiliated with al Qaeda drove out the U.S.-trained Malian army.

While Konna remains a battlefield, the enemy advance across the river appears to have been blunted, following repeated sorties by French Mirage fighters based in neighboring Burkina Faso; the jets also struck at Islamist rear bases in the eastern river city of Gao, taken by Ansar Dine and its AQIM (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) allies last April, and other bases in Mali’s vast north, a region of predominantly desert and savannah terrain which the Tuareg claim as their historic Azawad (homeland).