http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...ge=1&track=rss

Mali town recalls Islamist invaders as both terrifying and gentle

The militants' seizure of Diabaly during French airstrikes hints at their tactics: dig in among the population, use residents as a human shield, melt away.

A day later, with the rebels firmly in control, a pale green Toyota Prado arrived, carrying a high level commander. Rebels parked the four-wheel-drive vehicle under a tree and carefully coated it with red mud for camouflage.

"Six bodyguards went with him wherever he went, like a president," said neighbor Mousa Koumary, 48, who said he recognized the commander from pictures on television. It was Abou Zeid, the Algerian-born hard-line commander of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, he said.
Additional comments point to a well supplied and trained terrorist force, and I can't help but think some of this support is coming from states in the region. No doubt a lot of munitions came from Libya after the military lost control of it.

"There were whites and blacks among them," Dembele said of the militants. Residents said the men were Arabs, Algerians and Africans from Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria and Senegal, and spoke the local language as well as French, English and Arabic.
The multinational coalition aspect identified above, and the routes to Europe (and beyond) are what concern me most. This is potentially a much greater threat to the West than the Afghanistan base.

The mayor of Diabaly, Oumar Diakite, said the Malian army could never control the north, with its porous borders and network of smuggling routes.

"Those routes are not under the control of the army, and these jihadist people know those routes well through Algeria and Morocco and it is easy for them to get to Europe. It's a very vast zone that the army can never control," he said.