Mokhtar Belmokhtar Warned of a Foreign Military Intervention in Mali

Leader of Al Moulathamine (masked men) Battalion, which belongs to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, also nicknamed Khaled Abou Al Abbas warned Saturday that no one should be tempted to “profit from the situation” in north Mali “by collaborating with the foreign forces who are eyeing the region.”

In a statement released by Mauritania’s private news agency Nouakchott Informations (ANI), a mouthpiece for AQIM, Belmokhtar said: “We will not stand by with our arms crossed and we will act as the situation demands with firmness and determination.”

On Friday another Islamist militant cluster in lawless northern Mali, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), threatened countries who would be part of a military intervention force.

Mali has been gripped by chaos since disgruntled troops swarmed the capital Bamako within the south in March and ousted the elected president of what had been seen together of Africa’s model democracies.

Tuareg rebels and Islamist hardliners have taken over a stretch of northern Mali the scale of Afghanistan.

The militants, conjointly as well as the Ansar Dine cluster, have since imposed an austere version of sharia law in northern Mali, and that they have fallen out with the Tuareg.

The Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, is considering sending a military force of three,300 troops to Mali.

AQIM stems from a bunch started within the late Nineties by radical Algerian Islamists, who in 2007 formally subscribed to al Qaeda’s ideology.

These extremists, numbering around three hundred, have spun a decent network across tribal and business lines that stretch across the sub-Sahara Sahel zone, supporting poor communities and protecting traffickers.