France's Defence Minister, Florence Parly, arrived in northern Mali on Wednesday after a helicopter collision killed 13 French soldiers fighting ISIS-linked extremists.
Monday's crash on a moonless night led to France’s highest military death toll in nearly four decades.
An investigation has begun into the cause. The military said the helicopters were flying very low while supporting French commandos near the border with Niger.
Two black boxes from the helicopters were recovered, a French military spokesman said Wednesday.
"They will be handed over to the relevant authorities to be analysed," Col Frederic Barbry told BFMTV.
Some in Mali in recent weeks have criticised the French military’s presence as the extremist threat grows and spreads into neighbouring countries.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced this year, with more than 100 Malian troops killed in the past two months.
Some in Mali even questioned whether the collision was an accident.
In the capital, Bamako, resident Mamadou Fofana said that it could have been a way to calm the protests and bring compassion for the country’s former coloniser.
“Mali knows what this is costing the country to send its children to the Sahel in defence of this cause, the cause of peace,” said Mali’s President, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.
France’s operation in West and Central Africa is its largest overseas military mission and involves 4,500 personnel.
The deaths draw new attention to a worrying front in the global fight against extremism, one in which France and local countries have pleaded for more support.
French government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye said President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the military operation during Wednesday’s weekly Cabinet meeting.
Mr Macron said it was aimed at “enhancing our own security” and providing “important support” to African countries, Ms Ndiaye said.
A national tribute ceremony will take place on Monday at the Invalides monument in Paris.
Residents took flowers, lit candles and wrote notes of condolence at the town halls of Gap, Pau, Varces and Saint-Christol, where the soldiers were based.
French centrist senator Jean-Marie Bockel’s son was among those killed.
Mr Bockel told French news broadcaster BFM TV that his son, Pierre-Emmanuel Bockel, was on his fourth tour to Mali.
He was “proud of his mission because he knew that if the French military leaves tomorrow, this is chaos", his father said.
Most French politicians have praised the country's military operation in the Sahel as crucial to the global fight against extremism.
Who has been sanctioned?
Daniella Weiss and Nachala
Described as 'the grandmother of the settler movement', she has encouraged the expansion of settlements for decades. The 79 year old leads radical settler movement Nachala, whose aim is for Israel to annex Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where it helps settlers built outposts.
Harel Libi & Libi Construction and Infrastructure
Libi has been involved in threatening and perpetuating acts of aggression and violence against Palestinians. His firm has provided logistical and financial support for the establishment of illegal outposts.
Zohar Sabah
Runs a settler outpost named Zohar’s Farm and has previously faced charges of violence against Palestinians. He was indicted by Israel’s State Attorney’s Office in September for allegedly participating in a violent attack against Palestinians and activists in the West Bank village of Muarrajat.
Coco’s Farm and Neria’s Farm
These are illegal outposts in the West Bank, which are at the vanguard of the settler movement. According to the UK, they are associated with people who have been involved in enabling, inciting, promoting or providing support for activities that amount to “serious abuse”.
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
Six large-scale objects on show
- Concrete wall and windows from the now demolished Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in Poplar
- The 17th Century Agra Colonnade, from the bathhouse of the fort of Agra in India
- A stagecloth for The Ballet Russes that is 10m high – the largest Picasso in the world
- Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s Kaufmann Office
- A full-scale Frankfurt Kitchen designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, which transformed kitchen design in the 20th century
- Torrijos Palace dome
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
LILO & STITCH
Starring: Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, Maia Kealoha, Chris Sanders
Director: Dean Fleischer Camp
Rating: 4.5/5
