The French government defended an airstrike earlier this year that a U.N. report said mainly killed civilians attending a wedding.
The French defense ministry has insisted that the strike on 3 January killed about 30 Islamist militants, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The ministry said in a statement it is “impossible to distinguish credible sources from the false testimony of possible terrorist sympathizers or people under the influence of or threatened by jihadist groups.”
Minusma, the U.N. mission in Mali, reported the strike occurred in Bounti, killing 19 guests and three militants. The Guardian reported that a jihadist insurgency has been taking place in the country for nearly a decade.
The paper said it spoke to a guest at the wedding who survived the strike. He said the region at the time was under the control of jihadists, who “don’t accept weddings and baptisms.”
“If they had known about it they would have banned it. There were no jihadists, we were just celebrating among ourselves,” the witness said.
TRENDPOST: As Gerald Celente noted when the U.S. declared war against oil-rich Iraq in 2003, “Do you think America would have invaded the country if their main export was broccoli?”
So, too, with France, which is continuing its colonial strategy by forcibly stealing a natural resource it wants and needs from African countries that own it… such as Mali and Niger.
As with other invading sources, they will kill and destroy whatever and whoever they want to get what they want. For France, the essential natural resource they require is large quantities of uranium, since some 80 percent of the nation’s electricity is generated from 59 nuclear reactors.
For 50 years, France has held a colonial power relationship with Mali to exploit its resources, particularly uranium. Indeed, some of the world’s largest sources of uranium lie underneath the deserts in northern Mali and neighboring eastern Niger.
The situation in Mali has significantly worsened as a result of the U.S.-led destruction of Libya in 2011. With the fall of Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi and the complete collapse of the government, the Tuareg fighters who had supported Gaddafi fled south and west to Mali loaded with Libyan weapons.
Within months, those fighters helped ignite an armed rebellion leading to the Islamist takeover of the government. Under the guise of defeating these “terrorists,” France reinforced its colonial intentions.
And similar to the U.S. justifying its Middle East wars on fighting terrorism rather than its lust for oil, France and its allies still claim their presence in Mali is to fight the infestation of terrorist violence by militant jihadists – not its lust for uranium.
