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Bamako in mourning as radical group names the gunmen behind Mali hotel attack
BAMAKO, Mali (AP)—Mali began a three-day mourning period with flags flying at half-staff on Monday for victims of the assault on a luxury hotel full of foreigners, a day after a dueling claim of responsibility emerged.
The Islamic extremist group, Al-Mourabitoun, that first claimed responsibility for Friday's assault issued a new audio recording identifying the two gunmen, according to a Mauritanian news site that often receives messages from Malian extremists.
The group said the two were the only assailants in the attack that killed 19 people. Initial reports from witnesses and officials suggested there could have been as many as 10 gunmen. The bodies of only two gunmen were recovered from the scene.
The recording from the Al-Mourabitoun (The Sentinels) group identified the gunmen as Abdel Hakim Al-Ansari and Moadh Al-Ansari, Al-Akhbar said in an article posted online Sunday. No nationalities were given, though the name "Al-Ansari" suggests they were both Malian.
Meanwhile, a different extremist group that emerged only this year also issued a claim of responsibility for the attack. The claim, reported Sunday by French media, underscores the shifting alliances and memberships of the extremist groups operating in Mali and nearby countries.
The new group, the Macina Liberation Front, is active in central Mali and said it had worked with yet another militant group, Ansar Dine. The claim said the attack was in retaliation for Operation Barkhane, the regional French fight against Islamic extremists, according to Radio France Internationale.
France's Defense Ministry on Monday provided new details of French support during the siege, describing in a statement how 40 French special forces arrived in Bamako at 3 p.m. and helped Malian forces move floor by floor "to flush out the terrorists." Two of the troops were slightly injured, the statement said.
Officials in this former French colony have said they are searching for more than three suspects who may have been involved in the attack, though they have provided no other details on the possible leads.
In the absence of clear information, analysts have speculated on other possible motives, including a desire to disrupt Mali's fragile local peace process or a wish by al-Qaida and its affiliates to demonstrate its relevance amid high-profile attacks by its rival, the Islamic State group.
Al-Mourabitoun has links to al-Qaida and the group's first statement on Friday described collaboration with al-Qaida's "Sahara Emirate."
On Monday morning, the national flag outside Prime Minister Modibo Keita's office was lowered to half-staff just after sunrise. Burkina Faso Prime Minister Lt. Col. Yacouba Isaac Zida was in town to express his condolences, and Benin President Thomas Boni Yayi was expected Monday afternoon.
"We are aware that the country is in crisis and we must stand with the victim's families," said Makan Kone, a spokesman for Keita, adding that the ceremony was "to show our pain for the death of 19 people."
(November 24, 2015, The Associated Press)
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For many years I had suspected it: the profoundly impoverished, sad-looking souls in the photo that accompanied the news story (above) which I just spotted in the local freebee metro-daily are all human beings after all, and can likely even experience suffering just like us far more fortunate folks in the fully developed, ‘civilized’ world. Had I not seen this atypically-published story, I may have never even thought it possible. Perhaps since the Mali government spoke of the said 19 victims of suicide bombers like the victims were/are indeed human beings, much of the large global news-media thus also perhaps found them worthy of a relatively large part of the page—or maybe it was vice versa—yet all nonetheless done regardless of the extremely hazardous part of the globe in which they reside.
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“Mentality (noun) [often derogatory]: the characteristic attitude of mind or way of thinking of a person or group.”
—The New Oxford Dictionary of English
An Exposed Mentality of Meagre Worth Measured Then Coldly Calculated Into Column Inches
With news-stories’ human subjects’ race and culture dictating
quantity of media coverage of even the poorest of souls,
a renowned newsman formulated a startling equation
justly implicating collective humanity’s news-consuming callousness
—“A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus
make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.”
According to this unjust news-media mentality reasonably deduced
five hundred prolongedly-war-weary Middle Eastern Arabs getting blown
to bits in the same day perhaps should take up even less space and airtime.
So readily learned is the tiny token short story buried in the bottom
right-hand corner of the newspaper’s last page, the so brief account
involving a long-lasting war about which there’s virtually absolutely
nothing civil; therefore caught in the warring web are civilians most
unfortunate, most weak, the very most in need of peace and civility.
And it’s naught but business as usual in the damned nations
where such severe suffering almost entirely dominates the
fractured structured daily routine of civilian slaughter
(plus that of the odd well-armed henchman) mostly by means
of bomb blasts from incendiary explosive devices,
rock-fire fragments and shell shock readily shared with freshly shredded
shrapnel wounds resulting from smart bombs sometimes launched for
the stupidest of reasons into crowded markets and grade schools …
Hence where humane consideration and conduct were unquestionably
due post haste came only few allocated seconds of sound bite—a half minute
if news-media were with extra space or time to spare—and one or two
printed paragraphs on page twenty-three of Section C; such news
consumed in the stable fully developed, fully ‘civilized’ Western world
by heads slowly shaking at the barbarity of ‘those people’ in that
war-torn strife which has forced tens of thousands of civilians to post haste
gather what’s left of their shattered lives and limbs and flee …
Thus comes the imminent point at which such meager-measure
couple-column-inches coverage—if any at all—reflects the civil
Western readers’ accumulating apathy towards such dime-a-dozen
disaster zones of the globe, all accompanied by a large yawn; then the
said readers subconsciously perceive even greater human-life devaluation
from the miniscule ‘hundreds-dead-yet-again’ coverage.
Consequently continues the self-perpetuation of the token-two-column-inch
(non)coverage as the coldly calculated worth of such common mass slaughter,
ergo those many-score violently lost human lives are somehow worth
so much the less than, say, three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.
Perhaps had they all been cases of the once-persecuted suddenly
persecuting or the once-weak wreaking havoc upon their neighboring indigenous
minorities—perhaps then there’d be far more compassionately just coverage?
The human mind is said to be worth much more than the sum of the
human body’s parts, though that psyche may somehow seem to be of
lesser value if all that’s left is naught but bomb-blast-dismembered body parts.■
Frank Sterle Jr
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