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Saving Africa From Islamism

"Talking with jihadists and fighting terrorism is not contradictory. I have a duty and a mission today to create all possible spaces and to do everything possible so that, by one means or another, some kind of appeasement can be achieved. It's time certain avenues were explored."
"We're going to try and do what the people want, like with the jirga in Afghanistan, to put it into practice, and we're trying to do it without being naive, we're not gullible."
"We'll continue with our work, with our duty, but we want to make sure that we will no longer be stubborn about things, stuck, or obtuse."
Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita 

"People think that Shariah is more rapid, less corrupt and delivered in a manner that people can understand."
"It is also less costly."
Drissa Traore, head, Bamako office, International Federation for Human Rights

"The jihadists have gained the hearts and minds of many people."
"But what people are asking for are basic social services; they are not asking for jihadist services. They want things like roads and education."
"The battle will never be won through military means."
Riccardo Maia, MINUSMA head office, Timbuktu

"In all countries in the region  you can see economic and social progress in capitals and other cities, but not when you leave the cities."
"If you go to more remote areas, nothing has changed for 20 or 30 y6ears. You don't have leaders in the region who seem genuinely to appreciate the stakes."
Gilles Yabi, director, Wathi, West African think tank

The Western effort -- mostly through French military intervention followed by diplomacy in a former French colony -- to curtail Islamist insurgencies spreading with alarming rapidity through the Sahel region of Africa, sees the minds of ordinary Malians appear to have accepted the message delivered by jihadists even though they recall the Islamist brutality they reeled under eight years earlier when a jihadist seizure of Timbuktu destroyed heritage sites and irreplaceable ancient documents and slaughtered the unconvinced.

Back then it was forbidden to smoke, for a woman or girl to be seen in the presence of men or boys at risk of flogging. Even so, the jihadists earned a reputation of stern anti-corruption and in their presence there was no crime being committed, given that Shariah actively engaged with the chopping off of hands as a deterrent against theft. "Now there are bandits everywhere", one disgruntled man stated, using a chopping down motion to indicate the effectiveness of Shariah.

The 2013 French-led military force drove the al-Qaeda affiliates from Timbuktu and other Malian towns, but seven years on, jihadists are still about in northern Mali, expanding their reach into other regions the while, despite the presence of 5,000 French troops and a 15,000-strong separate UN peacekeeping force named MINUSMA. The Sahel, a vast region on the southern fringe of the Sahara, now hosts the jihadist insurgency in other states.

Militants have convinced many northern Malians that they should be trusted to represent the people's interests far more than the government in Bamako, the capital of the country. Successive governments in Bamako have neglected the communities in northern Mali for decades. Government is equated with police, soldiers, judges and officials accused with being invested in what they can loot from northern Mali, not in benefiting locals.

Bribery and extortion, and/or involvement in Saharan drugs, weapons and people-smuggling networks cross the region and to the people living there, this is what they think of how the government manifests its interest in their welfare. Even while the jihadists have their hand in drug running as well as smuggling, they have been seen to use their profits to build Koranic schools and Shariah courts to aid in entrenching their extreme ideology, presenting themselves as the legitimate alternatives to the ineffective, disinterested state.

MINUSMA has been heartened by the arrival of 250 British soldiers to aid them in fending off repeated attacks on bases, and mounting dangerous operations to protect civilians. The group has performed whatever it could manage to replace the vacuum left by the state; repairing the road from the Niger to Timbuktu, and in Gao, a former jihadist town, helping to fund women's agricultural collectives, and build police stations, important moves to help win support among the populace.

Mali's president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita is recognized among other Sahelian leaders as making no serious effort to address the frustration that exists in ignored and marginalized parts of their states, according to analysts. Possibly, in reaching an accord with the Islamist fanatics, the government can dispense with the nuisance pretense of fairly administering a portion of the country that is of little interest to them, voluntarily offering a firm foothold to jihad which will inevitably begin to make further inroads.

The futile West hoping to save Muslims from the greater and graver human rights abuses of Shariah-led Islam. And while France invests itself in trying to save its former colonies from collapse into the hands of Islamist terrorism, it nurtures at home in its banlieues transposed Islamists hostile to French values and ideology and determined to transform France into a bastion of Islamist Shariah using whatever means and patience required to achieve their goal.