A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM THAT WILL ONLY END WHEN INDEPENDENCE IS ACHIEVED!
The Malian government’s military operations amount to war crimes and are aimed to alter the demographic situation in Azawad with ethnic cleansing and genocide, and forcing the Azawadi people to seek refuge in refugee camps in Algeria and Mauritania.
The main problem with the situation in Azawad is that this struggle has a background, a history that has never been understood, because the fact that the Azawadians have never considered themselves part of Mali and have never agreed to join Mali, a country with which they have nothing in common, has always been ignored since the French colonists arrived and invaded the country.
And because of this, and the fact that Mali is committing genocide against the Azawadian people with the help of criminal foreigners, the struggle will never end, not until this problem is resolved and Azawad gains its independence.
Mali ignores the fact that the Azawadian people lived on their land long before colonization even began, it is their ancestral land, that is where they belong. Not Mali. Mali was created by France.
France reason to attach the stolen Azawad land to Mali, was a way to make Mali and extension of french colonialism and to keep their control over Azawad due to they knew it contained riches in the form of natural recources. Mali on their part, are still is trying to drive out the original inhabitants by all means, using terrorism, drones, fires, poisoning, murders, whatever you want, even the barbaric acts of eating human flesh, yes you read that right, and there is a lot of documented confirmed evidence.
They are doing everything to exterminate everything that lives in Azawad. And they are dependent on getting help from the outside since they have never been able to beat the Azawadi resistance, so they must take help from the outside, from criminal terrorists like Wagner. And they themselves (Mali) are the ones that brought the terrorist groups to Azawad, and they buy drones from Turkey, and Turkey by selling them, are also guilty.
The Azawadian people have the right to independence, the right to live in peace without being killed every day by Mali and its allies. It is a just cause. Azawad has an old history.
Mali tries to label them as terrorists and rebels, but this is misleading and the term “terrorist” is a blatant lie to make the world believe that they are terrorists so that they cannot get any support and to give the Malian junta the “green card” or “license to kill” the Azawadian people. What is the terrorism in resisting oppression and fighting for your rights?
Call them independentists, freedom fighters or revolutionaries, but not rebels or terrorists.
Bilal Ag Acherif: “Today, we can consider that Mali is made up of two or three zones: the South, Macina and Azawad. These are the three zones that the French put together to make Mali. It is a construction that the Azawadians have never accepted.
So we have never been rebels. We are a nation that resists against a humiliation that was imposed on it. Currently, a revolution is underway in Azawad and not a rebellion. This revolution has several facets: that of identity, that of culture, that of stopping aggression and many other things. Those who have not taken the measure of the problem of Azawad here inside, it is difficult for them to understand it through the communication of the Malian government or the resolutions of the United Nations.
Our first duty is to make our fight understood by as many people as possible. And that is why we invite everyone to come here, see, listen and understand the Azawadians. We believe that all those who support international law, freedom or justice must provide assistance to Azawad in its fight against Wagner’s terrorists.”
A more detailed and in-depth article with the full interview of Bilal Ag Acherif can be read on the page – Meeting with Bilal Ag Acherif, President of the Azawad Liberation Front.
You can’t just come from abroad and occupy a country in another part of the world that doesn’t belong to you, and then create artificial borders (drawn in another part of the world) that don’t take into account the people in the colonized (stolen) country. And then, instead of giving it back after colonization give it to another country that has a culture and a people that are totally different – without creating insoluble problems.
The people of Azawad never asked for it, never wanted it and still do not want it. Moreover, all attempts at negotiation on the Azawadian side have never worked because Mali does not want peace with the Azawadian people. But they are fighting back because they have nowhere to go, they have been born there for generations.
The enemy has invaded and displaced thousands of families and violated all human rights. Attempts at negotiations has always been broken by Mali. The latest was the Algiers Agreement, sponsored and guaranteed by the United Nations, which, as guarantors of this agreement, did nothing to prevent Mali’s violations of the agreement and its subsequent cancellation.
Mali broke it off because they do not want peace agreements, they do not want any human rights, they want to continue their genocide of the people of Azawad. So what choice does Azawad have? Freedom is not given, it is taken.
Its not the fault of the revolutionaries that the Azawadian people suffer, it is not them who started the oppression, it was not them who gave their land to France who in turn unjustly attached it to Mali. Its not them who do not want peace – but they want their freedom! they are not Malians, they are Azawadians and they lived in Azawad first, it`s their land, their right. They do right to resist this unjust oppression. And they have nowhere else to go because they were born there, just like their ancestors who lived there thousands of years ago.
A new unit of the Azawad liberation movements has been formed, pictured are revolutionary fighters holding the new FLA flag in front of the banner of the martyrs of the Battle of Tinzawaten which ended in a resounding victory in July 2024.
A BIT OF HISTORY OF THE SITUATION BEFORE 2012.
DELIBERATE NEGLECT AND INFLUX OF TERRORISTS
The Malian state has neglected the Azawad region since it was ceded to them by France, which laid the foundation for the discontent of the Azawadian people, as this neglect made the region a lawless zone that became a haven for various armed groups at the time and continues to do so today.
The Malian authorities have neglected any type of development, health and education projects. In addition to this failure, corruption and bribery have spread within the Malian authorities and it was later discovered that Malian officials were involved in the activities of the various gangs and armed groups that flooded the Azawad region.
HOW THE AZAWADI LIBERATION MOVEMENTS WERE FALSELY LABELED AS TERRORISTS
These gangs were not the original inhabitants of Azawad, so where did they come from? According to the research that has been done on the subject and the books that have been written, the terrorist group Al-Qaeda was brought to Azawad by former Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure.
In his book “Al-Qaeda and its Allies in Azawad: Origins and Secrets of Expansion,” Cheikh Ag Oussa, former Vice-Emir of Ansar Dine, stated:
“Former Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure is the one who brought Al-Qaeda to Azawad, enabled it, and fought it. Its aim was to strike the Azawad liberation movements, disrupt them, tarnish their reputation on a global scale and associate them with terrorism.”
As for Ansar Dine, it directed the Al-Qaeda weapons that the Malian president had brought to the Malians themselves and used them to expel their forces from Azawad, which Ansar Dine succeeded in doing.
The book “Al-Qaeda and its allies in Azawad: Origins and secrets of expansion” was published by the Al Jazeera Center for Studies in 2014. Written by Mohamed Mahmoud Abu Al-Maali, a researcher specializing in armed groups in the Sahel and the Sahara, and secretary general of the Mauritanian Journalists’ Union.
What is known is that these groups, which later formed Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), were at war with the Algerian government in the early 1990s, and when they were cornered in their northern Algerian homeland, they fled to the southern desert, then pushed deep into Azawad and then into the rest of the Sahara.
But what is meant by saying that “President Touré let them in” is that he let them in and move around freely, or at best turned a blind eye to them. The Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar (nicknamed the One-Eyed Man), the leader of this group, had direct contacts with President ATT and they were related by marriage to the Barabish, according to the author.
This is the context in which the terrorist label of the Azawadian freedom fighters was created, and which the Malian authorities used and still use in their program of genocide. And the Malian propaganda machine propagated it around the world and fabricated the lie that they are “fighting terrorism” when in reality they do not really fight the real terrorist groups, instead they focus on killing Azawadian civilians.
Al-Qaeda played a role in the destruction of Azawad’s independence in 2012, but that was not the only reason. There was also the total bias of the international community, the non-recognition of independence by any country, their complete disregard for the facts related to the conflict between Azawad and Mali, the ineligibility of the latter to lead the region, the fragility of the regime, the spread of corruption and the various crises in Mali itself. Al-Qaeda and its successor groups did not operate in a vacuum, but rather behind the weapons and agenda of international and regional intelligence services.
The 2012 independence that got swept away (it lasted only one year) by what we think was a combination of the influx of these jihadists groups, the lack of interest by the international community and the lack of unity among the Tuaregs. The jihadist who came and took over, sweeping away the independantists and imposed their own extreme sharia laws on the people and created such a chaos and insecurity that the people, as most likely was their intention, got so tired of it all that some stopped resisting and supporting the indepandentists, and some others even starting to think that the problems was due to the indepandentists which was not the case.
And with breaking the people`s spirits, the Malian governement along with the jihadists gets them where they wants, and at the same time they implemented the “terrorist label” on the revolutionaries. The fall of the independence for Azawad was also caused by the lack of unity among the Tuaregs and that lack of unity was used by the Malian governement and others who did not want to see a free and independent Azawad.
That is, we think, very much the reason also why the Malian army on dec 1st 2024 so quickly went and sent drones to attack the Tuareg leaders of the FLA and killed several of them the very day after their formation which has the goal of one unity of the Azawad mouvements and the total independence of Azawad. There are many who do not want to see this unity as it threatens their personal interests. There were also attempts on the social media to plant lies about the FLA.
ILLEGAL GROUPS AND DRUG TRAFFIC
Illegal terrorist groups and gangs that have multiplied over the years due to the laxity of the Malian authorities in the northern part, Azawad, and for them at the time, this area became a den to store both weapons and drugs and the desert was used as a landing airport for cocaine trafficking from South America and other places.
In 2009, a giant Boeing 727 cargo plane from Venezuela had an accident while landing in the area north of Gao called Tarkent. It was later revealed that the plane had been deliberately burned after the 10-ton cargo of cocaine had been unloaded and the crew members had been safely flown back to Venezuela from Bamako. This could never have been done without the knowledge and consent of the Malian authorities at the time.
Drugs were also transported through this desert from the border of Algeria and Morocco, via Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya, Egypt (the Sinai desert) to Nigeria, Sudan, Chad. These gangs also trafficked weapons, cigarettes, gasoline and other items, it was a very lucrative business, and the Azawadian area, abandoned by Mali, was used, without any regard for the original nomadic populations who only wanted to live in peace on their land without all these foreign elements occupying their land.
All this trafficking of various illegal groups takes place without any intervention or objection from the Malian authorities who turn a blind eye. Someone said – where there is profit, there is profit for the corrupt.
These illegal groups can therefore safely use a large area in the Azawad desert, a desert extending to the northern parts of Niger, Burkina Faso as well as southern Algeria and northeastern Mauritania.
But let us recall that all this happened before the 2012 revolution and the expulsion of the Malian army from all the cities and regions of Azawad and the declaration of independence, while even today, Malians promote the idea that these events are at the origin of the chaos in the region.
These events have certainly caused a lot of problems and chaos and the terrorist groups are still doing so, but this should not replace the real objective of the struggle for the independence of Azawad, which is the unjustified cession of Azawad to the new state of Mali by France in the 1960s, without the consent of the indigenous people of Azawad.
To attach them to a land and a people with whom they have nothing in common, and the drawing of artificial borders cutting and dividing tribes, families and peoples. Followed by the immediate neglect of Azawad by Mali and the oppression of the people through marginalization and genocide due to a racial agenda that is still happening, now with the addition of the support of foreign powers with Russian mercenaries with interests in Azawad’s natural resources, and the use of Turkish drones.
The damage done to the Azawadian people is enormous and very tragic, with thousands of people displaced from their ancestral lands and becoming refugees.
As can be seen, from the very brief and simplified explanation of this history of events in this writing, it has created a very complicated multifaceted situation. Today, the Azawad resistance movements for the independence of Azawad, wrongly called rebel groups, now grouped in the FLA unity, are fighting multiple enemies, from Mali and other corrupt states that seek to steal the natural resources of the region, the Russian Wagner mercenaries employed by Mali to help in the genocide under the label of “protection” to various terrorist gangs and other armed groups as well as certain traitors to their own people who sold them out for money and positions – who are only used by Mali and who later on will be thrown away like trash.
But the Azawadian people do not give up until independence is achieved because they know that their cause is a just cause and they are not fighting for money, they are fighting for the freedom of their people.
This text is an attempt to explain a little bit of the context of the situation in which the Azawadian people live and why there is a struggle for independence.
Since the time of Traoré, the current Malian regime still tries to label the Azawad liberation movements as “terrorists”, even though they do not target or kill any civilians.
Conclusion: It was not the Tuaregs who brought the terrorists to Azawad as some like to claim in order to deceive people and fight the independence. Algerian terrorists have been in the area since 1998, when it was under Malian rule.
HOSTAGE TAKING
And then there is this difficult situation of hostage-taking of foreigners carried out by criminal armed groups, often in collaboration with certain corrupt authorities.
Nicolas Normand (former French ambassador to Mali) once said: “I have often spoken about this problem with President ATT, (Amadou Toumani Touré) with the Prime Minister, with the Secretary General of the President, and everyone told me: “Listen, it doesn’t bother us at all that these people are taking hostages, it’s a problem for Westerners.
“But for us it doesn’t bother us at all, we have an implicit agreement with them that they will not attack us and we will not attack them either.”
This means that the President’s entourage was involved in the release of the hostages. So in principle and for good reason, we knew in fact that a few intermediaries received a percentage of the ransom.
This aroused suspicion, it posed a problem, which led us to say: the Malian authorities are also involved in this hostage-taking. »
There`s a thread and a video about how the illegal activity of selling hostages on Azawadian territory has always been supported and encouraged by successive authorities in Mali …”
This is not an opponent’s claim; rather, it is a fact stated by French diplomats (the creator and sponsor of the statelet of Mali) even before the crisis and the latter’s departure, as the French ambassador testifies.
https://twitter.com/Abdullah_imik/status/1880742834841755863
THE TEXT ON THE FOUNDING STATEMENT OF THE AZAWAD NATIONAL MOUVEMENT, TIMBUKTU, 11/01/2010.
In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
We, the sons of the Azawad people, who convened in the historic city of Timbuktu from October 31 to November 1, have reviewed the overall challenges facing the Azawad region for more than 50 years, the tragedy that the Azawad people have been and are being subjected to, the critical stage they are going through today at all political, economic and social levels, and what they are suffering from in terms of marginalization, exclusion, siege, displacement and the violation of the pure Azawad soil by anyone who dares to tamper with it. All this is happening with the blessing and support of the Malian state, in an ongoing approach against the Azawad people for 50 years.
As the world sees and witnesses, Mali has allowed and cooperated with groups that are rejected by Azawad and internationally, and facilitated their activities in the Azawad region with the aim of covering up the crimes committed against the Tuareg and the Azawad Arabs in general under the name of combating terrorism, until Azawad became an area of conflict of influence between countries and extremist groups. The Azawadis are now between the hammer of the Malian army and the anvil of these groups described as terrorists.
Azawad has become vulnerable to regional and international interventions, each according to its own interests and agendas, and the Azawadis no longer have a role to play except that of helpless spectators as they watch their land being distorted and their wealth being plundered by the Malian government and the international companies contracting with it without knowing anything about the nature of these contracts in light of the complete absence of any real representation of the Azawadis that reflects their position on what is happening on their land.
Aware of the suffering of our people that has continued for decades, in response to the living conscience of the zealous sons of the nation, in defense of the Azawad national identity that is threatened with loss, in continuation of the struggle of fathers and grandfathers, in commitment to universal human values, and also considering the dangerous developments that have appeared on the Azawad scene in recent years, we announce today the establishment and birth of the Azawad National Movement, an Azawad political organization that represents the peaceful approach to achieving legitimate goals and reclaiming all usurped historical rights.
The Azawad National Movement addresses the call to all the sons of Azawad, regardless of their social affiliations and geographical regions, to join it, stressing the importance of unity of ranks, words and political position, and making every effort to achieve the desired national goals, each according to his position and field.
The Azawad National Movement declares that it adopts the political and legal approach to restore all rights, rejects violence, and condemns terrorism in all its forms, whether state terrorism or terrorism of groups and individuals, while being keen on the necessity of distinguishing between terrorism and legitimate resistance. It calls on the State of Mali to fully recognize the historical rights of the Azawad people, and to respond seriously to resolve the Azawad issue peacefully.
It also extends the hand of brotherhood, friendship and cooperation to all sisterly and friendly countries, and welcomes and looks forward to effective cooperation relations with all countries and peoples of the world and all international governmental and non-governmental bodies.
The Azawad National Movement warns all bodies and companies contracting with the State of Mali on issues related to the Azawad region of the necessity of reviewing and reconsidering these contracts, considering that they were signed without the prior consent of the owners of the land, as stipulated by international laws.
The Azawad National Movement
Timbuktu, 11/01/2010
2025
Recently, a list of Malian influencers, and perhaps others from other AES countries, was leaked and published on social media, it was about receiving huge salaries and sums of money to make propaganda and polish the image of the military council.
The kidnappings have stopped since 2022, but last week (in January 2025) there were two operations in a short time, the kidnapping of an Austrian woman in Agadez, a humanitarian, and a Spanish man who was kidnapped with a group of Algerians near Tamanrasset, but the others were released before the kidnappers entered the Azawad territory with the hostage.
In fact, according to published information, the case was carried out by local groups that practice organized crime, looting and banditry, but these groups have links with different parties (Mali and their agents in Azawad, and extremist groups).
Some observers and specialists in the region’s news have stated that this group of kidnappers had initially offered to sell the hostage to JNIM, but that the latter had refused due to a change in their policy and had offered to sell him to EIGS, which had negotiated the agreement. According to the FLA, these groups are often directed and employed to serve Mali’s agenda within Azawad.
The FLA issued a press release on January 18, in which it condemned the kidnapping of hostages and their transfer to Azawad territory. How this hostage situation ended can be read here. In short, we can tell you that the situation was resolved with the help of the FLA who carried out a successful rescue operation of the kidnapped Spanish tourist.
The Sahara and the Sahel cannot be secured in any way without the Azawadis who traditionally always have been and still are – the safety valve of the Sahel, the Sahara and North Africa. Here`s an interesting article about that topic by Akli Sh´kka – Tuareg.. The separation wall between the north and south of the continent /Akli Sh`kka
https://essada.info/الطوارق-الجدار-العازل-بين-شمال-القارة
COEXISTENCE WITH MALI?
Some say that Azawad and Mali should co-exist… but when they say that they are ignorant in that they do not consider that i´ts Mali that neglected and oppressed the Azawadians from the very beginning right after France gave them Azawad after the colonialization. And that it was France who attached Azawad to Mali, two different countries, against the will of the Azawadian people, they simply ignored the people that was living there.
And that this oppression is what sparked the rebellions among the Azawadians who has never accepted any colonialization. The rebellions are nothing else than a reaction to unjust oppression. It was also Mali who broke the peace agreements.
Mali consider the Azawadian people as their enemies and there is no difference to them between civilians and those carrying weapons, and they will not be satisfied until the day they announce the complete extermination of the people of Azawad. Therefore, coexistence with them is impossible.
Here is a comment from X:
The Azawadi people are being shot dead in their own country, by the criminal regime of Mali. The only problem with these Azawadi people is that they are white and not black. And then, you will be told that you must reconcile with Mali, and that Mali is your country.
WHEN WILL THIS SITUATION AND THE FACT THAT THE AZAWADIAN REVOLUTIONARIES ARE FIGHTING FOR A JUST CAUSE BE KNOWN TO THE WORLD?
Overall, the indigenous people of Azawad have been victims of a very unjust invasion and oppression while the world remains silent. But the Azawadian freedom fighters do not give up their fight for freedom and the right to their homeland. They will never give up until the freedom and independence of Azawad is achieved.
The FLA has stated: TOTAL INDEPENDENCE IS THE GOAL.
The FLA flag is proudly displayed in Tinzawatine.
January 17, 2012. Independence was declared on April 6 of the same year.
Azawad Support Group
Azawad Freedom Voice
13-01-25
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