UK Troops set for Mali

In the early 1990s the nomadic Tuareg of the north began an insurgency over land and cultural rights that persists to this day, despite central government attempts at military and negotiated solutions.

The insurgency gathered pace in 2007, and was exacerbated by an influx of arms from the 2011 Libyan civil war.

A major increase in the UK commitment to help French and African forces in Mali and the region has been confirmed by Downing Street.

Number 10 said 200 UK troops would train an African regional force outside Mali, with up to 40 more on an EU training mission inside Mali. A further 70 RAF personnel will oversee the use of a Sentinel surveillance in the region and 20 will staff a C-17 transport plane for a further three months.

Britain has also offered a roll-on, roll-off ferry to help transport French armoury to Mali by sea, landing on the African coast.

British sources stressed again that Britain would have no combat role in Mali, but disclosed for the first time that Britain had offered to run with the French a combined joint logistics headquarters inside Mali. The UK made the offer at a meeting in Paris on Monday attended by the prime minister’s national security adviser, Sir Kim Darroch. The offer was rejected by the French at this stage as unnecessary, but shows the scale of the UK preparedness to help its closest military ally in Europe.

The offer of 200 troops to train members of the AFISMA regional force is being made by the UK deputy national security adviser at a meeting in Addis Ababa on Tuesday.

The prime minister’s spokesman stressed the UK military assistance was to “work out the appropriate support to regional forces”. No timetable was given for the length of the UK commitment. “We will do what we can to help the French mission and to contribute to a regionalised approach.”

Two days after the announcement by the Prime Minister that the UK would provide logistical support to French military operations in the West African state, 50 tons of military equipment were delivered to the capital Bamako, equivalent to a week’s worth of freight delivered to Afghanistan.

Wing Commander Simon Bellamy, the RAF liaison officer at the French military headquarters, said:

“The deployment demonstrates the decisive contribution that air power can make to any emerging operation. The pace of our response to the formal French request for logistical support illustrates not only the professionalism of our personnel but also the increasingly strong and operationally-focused links we have generated with the French Air Force since the Libya campaign.”