The French soldiers seeking out jihadists in central Mali's savannahs were ...
GOSSI, Mali - The French soldiers seeking out jihadists in central Mali’s savannahs were prepared for the sandstorms, the thunderstorms, the lack of anything resembling a road and the need to tow vehicles whose wheels kept getting stuck in floodplains.
Then, flash floods turned sandy ground to sludge and burst the wadis so only their newly deployed tracked fighting vehicles could cross. Efforts led by France to stop a region on Europe’s doorstep becoming a launchpad for attacks at home are increasingly trapped in an endless cat-and-mouse game with well-armed jihadists, who know the terrain and hide easily among civilians.
Operation Barkhane was launched in the wake of Operation Serval, a French offensive that pushed back Tuareg rebels and allied Islamists from northern Mali’s vast desert in 2013. “We have a dogged adversary, who is tough, drawing from a breeding ground that is favorable to him because the population is isolated,” Colonel Nicolas James, Commander of Desert Tactical Croup Belleface, told Reuters at its base in Gao.
That night it rained hard, so the next afternoon a logistics team spent all day towing vehicles out of mud. The mission set off before noon. When the troops returned nearly nine hours later, they’d covered just 5 km.
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