Saying Mali ‘Is Our Country,’ Militias Train to Oust Islamists

MOPTI, Mali — Hundreds of young men are stuffed into makeshift training camps near this provincial capital, arising at 4 a.m. for physical exercises and simulated hand-to-hand combat in preparation for the day when they can free their north Mali homeland from the radical Islamists whose harsh rule has driven tens of thousands of frightened, desperate civilians to flee the country.

The eager recruits have almost no weapons, little military instruction, and not much more than the hard ground to sleep on. They are definitely not in the army. A trainer in a scavenged uniform yells out, “Present, arms!” but there are no arms to present.

Yet the young men (and a few women) in these haphazard citizen militias, poised at the edge of the de facto front line with the Islamists, have something the regular Malian Army here appears to lack: a fierce will to undo the jihadist conquest of northern Mali that has alarmed governments across the world, spurred threats of a regional intervention force and imposed a repressive regimen of public beatings, whippings and even stonings on the local people.

Ever since the Malian Army overthrew the president in March, ending decades of democratic rule, the country has lost control over its vast desert north.

An array of fighters bent on enforcing a hard-edged brand of Islam and Shariah law — including members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — have seized the once tourist-friendly town of Timbuktu and other strategic sites, terrorizing or driving out any other claimants to power, destroying historic shrines and freely meting out punishment in the streets.

The Malian Army has been in seeming disarray, preoccupied with suppressing revolt within its own ranks and dissent within the citizenry in the south of the country. Soldiers who oppose the military junta have been tortured, journalists have been abducted and the military command seems more focused on punishing its rivals around the nation’s capital than on challenging the powerful Islamists up north.

Given its internal discord and reluctance to take on the Islamists, the army has been only too willing to embrace the fledgling militias, feeding them, providing instruction and even allowing them to shelter and train on abandoned state lands.

“These militias, they are very good,” said Col. Didier Dacko, who commands the Malian Army forces here. “We’re constantly exchanging with them. And we’re helping them with food, and teaching.”

Other West African nations have proposed sending in a regional force of 3,000 soldiers to help Mali recapture its territory. But the plan still needs to be approved by the United Nations Security Council, and Colonel Dacko said that any formal offensive, with or without international support, was still quite a way off. Indeed, the colonel said his men were no longer even going on patrols in contested areas.

By contrast, the militia leaders, some of them veterans of the guerrilla wars that have wracked this troubled West African nation since its inception, insist that their youthful charges, dirty tank-tops and torn jeans notwithstanding, are ready, if only they had the weapons.

“Time is wasting,” said Amadou Mallé, a former accountant and militia veteran who is director of training at the dusty encampment of the FLN, the Liberation Forces for the Northern Regions, one of three principal militia groups here.

“The enemy is implanting itself. We’re in a hurry, totally in a hurry,” said Mr. Mallé, wearing a uniform abandoned by the army after the fall of Timbuktu.

However unlikely their success may seem, given the few worn-looking rifles and light machine-guns in evidence, the militia leaders say they are tired of waiting for an army that shows no signs of budging.

“I’m going to use my very few means, to get out in front of the army,” said Ibrahim Issa Diallo, a former soldier who calls himself the military chief of the Ganda Iso, or “Sons of the Earth,” movement.

“Our goal is to liberate the north, whatever the price; we can’t abandon our relatives,” Mr. Diallo said. “The Islamists are marrying off our daughters.”