As Great Satan kicks off her 2nd Decade of Her Most Excellent Adventures against creepy creeps, non state actors and daemonic despotries in the war against That Which Must Not Be Named, the next battleground will be Mali.
Bordering 7 neighboring states with a pitiful lit rate far worse than Land of the Pure's (31% comped to 49%) Mali has catapulted herself way back to the 7th century
Medieval-era laws have been imposed. Thieves have their hands cut off. m"Hammedist policemen are everywhere. The “government” even whipped a 15-year old girl for speaking to men on the street. Music—all music—is banned. The Guardian reports a chilling recent story. Thugs armed with AK-47s drove up to the home of a local musician. He wasn’t there when they arrived, so they left a message with his sister. “If you speak to him, tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we’ll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with.”And the place has turned into a rat’s nest of the who’s-who of terrorist organizations operating in North Africa.
The harshest form of m"Hammedist law in the world is now being imposed at gunpoint. Ancient tombs and shrines are being bulldozed for the exact same reason the Buddha statues were destroyed in Afghanistan.
The Islamists are going on a Taliban-like rampage of destruction, destroying ancient Muslim religious tombs and shrines because they’re “idolatrous.” Bulgarian diplomat Irina Bokova minces no words. “This attack is led by a tiny armed minority, who violently imposes its interpretation of a faith on a distraught local community, spoiling centuries of tolerance and exchange,” she says. “The attack on Timbuktu's cultural heritage is an attack against this history and the values it carries—values of tolerance, exchange and living together… It is an attack against the physical evidence that peace and dialogue is possible.”
Earlier this year, shortly after a military coup toppled the feckless civilian government in Bamako, an Al Qaeda-affiliated organization called Ansar al-Dine seized power in Timbuktu and lopped off the northern part of the country.Pic - "We do not need to see a Mali which has a Caliphate in the north. Nor do we need to see another state created which would not be economically sustainable or viable."
This time around, we aren’t waiting for a devastating attack against an American city to do something about it, and not only because Al Qaeda is already a clearly identified enemy of Great Satan. Northern Mali may already be the return address for an attack against Great Satan. Some of the leaders of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, which was presumably behind the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, are believed to be based there.
The European Union is sending hundreds of military officers to train anti-"slamist militias while Great Satan and France are considering the use of Predator drones and Hellfire missiles.
Ansar al-Dine deserves everything coming its way. Mali was a political success story before the "Slamists took hold of the north. The country had what appeared to be a stable democratic government despite being one of the poorest on earth. Now it’s Afghanistan. Or Somalia. At least parts of it are.
Mali matters for the same reason Afghanistan mattered in early 2001 even though most of us couldn't see it yet. We might get lucky and have just a small proxy war, with moderate Tuaregs doing most of the fighting against Ansar al-Dine. No one can say for sure where this thing is heading.
All we know now is that it’s almost certainly the next war Great Satan will be involved in.
