PARIS — As Islamist fighters scored new gains in northern Mali, French ground forces intervened Friday to help the sagging Malian army, opening a new front in the confrontation between the West and al-Qaeda-allied guerrillas.
French President Francois Hollande, who announced the unexpected deployment, did not say how many French soldiers were on the ground or exactly what their mission is. But he promised that France’s participation in the fighting would “last as long as necessary” to guarantee that the Malian government and army can maintain control of the former French colony in northwest Africa. At stake is the very existence of the Malian state,” he said in a televised declaration. Hollande’s decision to intervene dramatized European and U.S. concerns over recent military gains by the half-dozen Islamist and Tuareg militias that have controlled the northern two-thirds of the country for more than seven months. Ruling a 250,000 square-mile area, they have scattered Malian soldiers southward, imposed strict Muslim laws on the civilian population and created a vast new haven for north African terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Fearing the largely desolate region could become a launch pad for terrorist attacks, France, the United States and other European governments have sought to organize an African military intervention force to restore Malian government authority. But a senior French security official acknowledged recently that the African force is nowhere near to being ready, meaning France had to intervene on its own if it wanted to respond to the immediate crisis. “The terrorists have regrouped in recent days along the line that artificially separates Mali’s north and south,” Hollande said in an earlier talk Friday to assembled French diplomats. “They have even advanced. And they are seeking to deal a fatal blow to the very existence of Mali. France, as is the case with its African partners and all the international community, cannot accept this.” Hollande, who took office last May, had consistently ruled out the dispatch of French ground forces in Africa, insisting the days of France operating as an African police force are over. But an appeal Thursday from Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traore, and the swift deterioration of the military situation apparently changed his mind. In addition, he indicated, France’s role as a power in Africa that can be relied on seemed to be at stake. “The terrorists must know that France will always be there to support a population that lives in democracy,” he declared. Reports in Paris quoted Malian soldiers as saying they were transported to northern Mali on Friday in aircraft made available by “foreign friends.” Other reports spoke of white-skinned soldiers seen in the region. But until Hollande’s announcement, French officials confirmed only that the Defense Ministry maintains a dozen soldiers in Bamako as part of a military cooperation program. Reports from Mali, just south of Algeria, said a Malian army counteroffensive apparently fell flat and Islamic guerrillas preserved their hold on the recently captured city of Konna. “We have chased the army out of the town of Konna,” Sanda Abou Mohamed, a spokesman for the Ansar Dine militia, told the Associated Press by telephone from the Islamist-held city of Timbuktu.