Mali's Touareg insurgents close in on key northern town of Gao

Heavily-armed rebels attacked Mali’s strategic northern city of Gao on Saturday, a day after they took the provincial capital of Kidal, witnesses and an official said. The move deepens the crisis in western African nations after a military coup which toppled President Amadou Toumani Touré earlier this month.

• Malian rebels and government troops fought for control of the northern garrison town of Gao on Saturday as the insurgents sought to capitalize on widespread chaos after last week’s military coup.

• The rebel assault on Gao came a day after the rebels – a loose alliance of separatist nomad Tuaregs and local Islamists – seized Kidal, one of the three main towns of north Mali, along with Gao and the historic trading city of Timbuktu.

• Junta leaders, whose neighbors have given them until Monday to hand back power to civilians or face sanctions including a crippling closure of Mali’s borders to trade, pledged to come up with proposals “very quickly” to restore constitutional order.

• Burkina Foreign Minister Djibril Bassolet told  reporters he was flying to Bamako on Saturday evening for discussions.
• A British reporter saw the rebels enter Gao early on Saturday and hoist the flag of Azawad, the desert territory bigger than France that they want to make their homeland, before pulling back after meeting resistance.

• The town of 90,000 people has the largest garrison in the north and regular army forces backed by helicopters and local militias held the town centre, prompting a retreat to the outskirts by rebel units.

• The unrest in Mali, Africa’s third largest gold producer, has been fuelled by weapons brought out of Libya during last year’s conflict, and risks creating a vast new lawless zone in the Saharan desert that armed Islamists and criminals could exploit.

• Mid-ranking officers behind last week’s coup had accused the government of giving them inadequate resources to fight the rebels. But the coup backfired spectacularly, emboldening the Touareg rebels to capture further ground in the norhernpart of Mali.