DAKAR, Senegal — The French military struck at Islamist militants dug in along the remote, rocky mountain ranges of northern Maliover the last week, killing scores, a French military spokesman said Friday.
The week’s operations, conducted with Chadian troops, were a further sign that the French military intervention against the jihadists in Mali, initially viewed as a quick strike, was not winding down soon.
Meanwhile, the Chadian president, Idriss Déby Itno, said that Abu Zeid, the most important commander in Al Qaeda’s regional franchise, had been killed in combat, Mr. Déby’s communications director, Dieudonné Djonabaye, said Friday night.
The Algerian newspaper El Khabar asserted that samples from the corpse presumed to be that of Abu Zeid — he was of Algerian birth — had been sent to Algiers for testing against relatives; a senior Algerian official declined to confirm the report on Friday night.
Abu Zeid’s death would represent a significant blow to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as he was considered the toughest, most resilient of the local Qaeda commanders, and the most ruthless. Abu Zeid is held responsible for the executions of at least two Western hostages in 2010 and 2009 — an elderly Frenchman and an elderly Briton — and his Qaeda unit is believed to be holding perhaps half a dozen other Western hostages. In addition, he has an extensive network of contacts throughout the region, allowing him to recruit in many countries, analysts said.
Abu Zeid had been spotted at Timbuktu during the Islamist ascendancy in northern Mali last year, and the harshShariah rule instituted there — public whippings, destruction of monuments, banning of music and other leisure activities — is attributed at least in part to him.
Still, hundreds of jihadist fighters remain in the mountains, said a senior official with the Tuareg rebel movement, which is playing a supporting role in the French military campaign. Analysts suggested though that the French and Chadian successes this week — as many as 130 terrorists killed in ground and air operations, according to the French spokesman — did not mean the French were getting bogged down in Mali, but rather that intelligence was improving and more extremists were being flushed out of their mountain retreats.
The French have some 1,200 soldiers in the region, and the Chadians 800, and they are concentrating their efforts on a 15-mile zone in the Adrar des Ifoghas, the rocky, barren mountains at Mali’s Algerian border, according to Col. Thierry Burkhard, the French military spokesman.
“From the beginning this has been the refuge of the region’s terrorist groups,” Colonel Burkhard said of the area around Tessalit, a settlement near the Algerian border. “Our objective is to comb through this zone, find the terrorist groups, then neutralize them.”
Colonel Burkhard said French forces alone had killed some 40 jihadists over the last week, while Chadian troops had eliminated perhaps 90. The French said there had been about 60 airstrikes, and about 10 of the jihadists’ vehicles had been destroyed.
“They are hanging on in a very determined fashion,” Colonel Burkhard said. “They are not looking to retreat. They want to hang on to their positions. They’ve been implanted in this region for a long time, and they’ve prepared the terrain. They’ve got foxholes, and they’ve got enough weapons to resist over the long term.”
Some 25 Chadian soldiers were killed in clashes with the jihadists last week — deaths that provoked Mr. Déby to call on other African nations to relieve Chad of some of the burden. Although other countries have deployed in Mali, they are generally well away from the fighting.
French and Chadian forces are carrying on the fight, more or less alone. “It’s not prolonged because of failure,” a Western defense attaché in the Malian capital, Bamako, said Friday night. “They are finding more jihadists. The French are very much keeping the tempo up. They are inflicting significant attrition,” but he added that the jihadists “are proving surprisingly resilient.”
Adam Nossiter reported from Dakar, Senegal, and Maïa de la Baume from Paris. Martin Zoutane contributed reporting from Ndjamena, Chad.
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