Mujahideen flock to Mali
www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/repo...

Foreign fighters have begun arriving in Mali, but these are not the long-awaited African military forces come to liberate the country from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the MUJAO and Ansar al-Din. "Hundreds of jihadists, mostly Sudanese and Sahrawis, have arrived as reinforcements to face an offensive by Malian forces and their allies," AFP quoted a Malian security source as saying on Tuesday (October 22nd). "They are armed and explained that they had come to help their Muslim brothers against the infidels," a Timbuktu resident said.

Sanad Ould Bouamama, official spokesperson for Ansar al-Din, says, "The arrival of hundreds of young mujahideen from different areas across the Islamic world to support us in our war against the infidels and crusaders is not strange or surprising."

"The same thing happened in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Somalia and Iraq," the Ansar al-Din official tells Magharebia. Ould Bouamama adds, "The war that the world is planning to wage against us is a war against Islam and all that is related to Islam. Its goal is to combat God's Sharia, and therefore, all mujahideen have to stand by our side."

DB2