I've been meaning to get to this, the trouble in Mali, a landlocked West African nation. Named for a great kingdom of the 18th and 19th centuries, the current borders have little to do with that kingdom's domain, but the ethnic groups felt like the name was appropriate enough.
They've been experiencing some armed turmoil in their hinterlands, and the French sent a contingent force months ahead of their own plan for securing help from other west African countries. It became obvious that if an important city fell, the insurgents would be very hard to un-entrench. It then became obvious that that particular town was about to fall, so the French jumped into action and sent troops while the politicians tried to get neighbor countries involved.
That scramble is still going on.
Egypt was the big sexy revolution of the Arab Spring, and at the tail end of that early portion of 2012, Syria seemed the last country to get on that bandwagon, but Assad had strong allies in Russia and Iran, and they're slipping continuously into outright civil war, and Egyptians are already pretty fed up with Morsi and the Brotherhood. Maybe because Mali is a black country and not a good representative of the dream of Arabs embracing democracy we're not hearing about it.
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