French Mali action enters third week

A breakaway faction from the Mali rebel front has called for a peaceful solution to the Mali crisis. Source: AAP

A FRENCH-LED offensive against radical Islamists occupying northern Mali has entered its third week.

French and Malian soldiers carried out joint patrols into the early hours of Friday morning some 200 kilometres south of Gao, an Islamist stronghold in Mali's north which has been battered by air strikes, a military source said.

"It's a first" in this region, the source said.

The patrols came a day after bombing raids destroyed two Islamist bases in Ansongo, about 80km from Gao, and the nearby village of Seyna Sonrai.

Extremists seized Gao, along with two other key northern Mali towns, Kidal and Timbuktu, 10 months ago, sparking fears the vast semi-arid zone could become an Afghanistan-like haven for terrorists.

France came to the aid of its former colony on January 11 as the Al Qaeda-linked Islamists broke south of their months-old frontline into government-held territory, seen as a threat to the capital Bamako.

Gao lies some 150 kilometres from the Niger border in eastern Mali, where more than 2000 Chadian soldiers and 500 from Niger are being deployed to open a second front against the Islamists.

French NGO Action Against Hunger warned the opening of a new front in Mali's east could worsen an already dire food shortage in the isolated area.

The organisation "fears strongly that an armed ground intervention from Niger will cut the last access route to supply basic goods (food and medicine)" to people in the region.

France's surprise decision to intervene has received broad international support but there has been increasing alarm about reports of rights abuses by Malian soldiers against ethnic Tuaregs and Arabs.

The International Federation of Human Rights Leagues said at least 31 people had been executed in the central town of Sevare, and some bodies dumped in wells.

Human Rights Watch said witnesses had reported "credible information" of soldiers sexually abusing women in a village near Sevare.

Mali's crisis began last January when the Tuareg desert nomads revived a decades-old rebellion for independence of the north, which they call Azawad.

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