Whats Happening in Mali?
By VIJAY PRASHAD Tucked away in the corners of the news media sits a report that the U. S. government will provide $5 million in trucks and military equipment to Mali. The aim of this donation is to help the Malian military fight the group known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Last December, AQIM kidnapped two Canadian diplomats, who were released after four months. This is what they do these days: kidnap, extort, run guns and drugs. Islam is a veneer. AQIM comes out of the brutal Algerian Civil War (1991-2002), which took the lives of over 200,000 people, and was fought between the secular-authoritarian National Liberation Front and various Islamist factions. The war ended when the Islamists lost the armed conflict. A few hardened veterans turned to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in the late 1990s, and this group became the AQIM (adopted into the al-Qaeda fold by its junior amir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2006). AQIM conducted a few spectacular operations, includin
