Mali.

This is coolbert:

Thanks to Professor Robert Launay and the Chicago Tribune we have some background information on the conflict as currently raging in Mali. Insurrection and military coup de etat further complicating an already bad situation.

Mali until recently not even a player much less a serious player for the U.S. military now for the American African Command [AFRICOM] a most important matter.

Those Pilatus reconnaissance/surveillance aircraft as deployed throughout African in part being flown against targets in Mali

"World reaction to coup's aftermath is slowed by blind support of democracy" - - By Robert Launay

"All of a sudden, Mali is big news. Unfortunately, it has taken the militant Islamists' willful, systematic destruction of historic monuments of Timbuktu to get our attention. Such radical Islamic iconoclasm, on a scale that recalls the Taliban's demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, has profoundly shocked the rest of the world."

[During the Medieval period the university at Timbuktu was a place of great Islamic learning and culture, without rival on the continent and on a par with those universities of Europe.]

That combination of Taureg and Al Qaeda type insurrectionists destroying all and any vestiges of the ancient Islamic way as practiced in Mali. Taliban and Wahhabi style Islam being the vogue, at least among the jihadists.

"The rebellion began as an unholy (and ultimately unstable) alliance of hard-line Islamists, the Ansar Dine ("soldiers of the faith"), and Tuareg militants fighting for autonomy if not outright independence." Ansar = "helper". Dine = deen = faith.

[Taureg often referred to as "blue men of the desert"]

Those fighters that confronted Gordon at Khartoum over one hundred years ago also calling themselves ansar, helpers!

That "central government" of Mali inept, ineffectual and incompetent, not able to successfully combat this rebellion of the Taureg and ansar, the military having overthrown [coup de etat] the legally constituted government gone only exacerbating an already bad situation.

coolbert.