That is extremelly secondary.

Here's how the rebels gained strength:

from the Libyan event.

'American' nations bombed arsenals in Libya and also reversed the course of the war, leading the late mad dog Guaddafi to open up the arsenals to the population to prepare for a last stand.

In both cases, the outcome was to provide the rebels who served as mercenaries for the late mad dog Guadafi with military grade weapons of a much better standard than they were used to handle (was reserved to Gadafi's official army)

When Mali looked around to try to upgrade their own military equipment to match the threat, just after the mercenaries started to leak into the country, 'american' nations forced a weapons embargo on them. Hence a fast advance by rebels.

It is just another 'american' engineering.

The defection of Mali military officers and equipment (which is inferior to the one the former mercenaries got from Libya) going with it, simply showed that those people were not blind to 'american' nations' scheming.

Also shows the spread of 'americanism': if you cant beat them, join them.

(Reuters) - Al Qaeda-linked Islamist rebels launched a counteroffensive in Mali on Monday after four days of French air strikes on their northern strongholds, seizing the central town of Diabaly and promising to drag France into a brutal Afghanistan-style war.

France, which has poured hundreds of troops into the capital Bamako in recent days, carried out more air raids on Monday in the vast desert area seized last year by an Islamist alliance grouping al Qaeda's north African wing AQIM alongside Mali's home-grown MUJWA and Ansar Dine militant groups.

"France has opened the gates of hell for all the French," a spokesman for MUJWA, Oumar Ould Hamaha, told Europe 1 radio. "She has fallen into a trap which is much more dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia."

Paris is determined to shatter Islamist domination of northern Mali, which many fear could become a launchpad for terrorism attacks on the West and a base for coordination with al Qaeda in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

The rebels infiltrated the town overnight from the porous border region with Mauritania, home to AQIM camps housing well-equipped and trained foreign fighters.

France, which has repeatedly said it has abandoned its role as the policeman of its former African colonies, convened a U.N. Security Council meeting for Monday to discuss the Mali crisis.



Under pressure from Paris, regional states have said they hope to send in their forces this week. Military chiefs from ECOWAS nations will meet in Bamako on Tuesday but regional powerhouse Nigeria, which is due to lead the mission, has cautioned that training and deploying troops will take time.

Officials in Washington have said the United States would share intelligence with France and was considering sending unarmed surveillance drones.

Britain has made available two giant C17 transport planes which will ferry French medical gear, tanks and other equipment to Mali this week.

He said they had obtained weapons from three sources. From Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi they had obtained mostly light weapons including Kalashnikovs, machine guns, rockets and surface-to-air missiles, along with jeeps and pickup trucks. "These were primarily used in the first battles, where they captured Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal against the Malian army. But there's not much left," he told Le Nouvel Observateur.

The second consignment of arms was captured when the Malian army fled Bamako as the Islamist forces captured the city. "The soldiers abandoned their bases with their weapons. The Islamists quite simply gathered up the armaments of the regular army: a few tanks, artillery, batteries. These weapons haven't yet been used," Guidère said.

The third wave of weapons was more recent, he said. "Since August, when France appeared more active and on the offensive on the subject [of Mali], the Islamists have been preparing for the possibility of an intervention. They began to use money collected from various trafficking of drugs and hostages. With this small capital they have, since September, bought everything they could on the black market. They approached all the dealers in the region, notably the Nigerians, and those from Chad and Libya."

He said there were also a lot of Russian arms in the region. "The Russians on learning of a western military operation let their arms dealers in Africa sell anything and everything. Here, the Islamists have a stock of modern material, [effective] and efficient, especially against helicopters and tanks, including night-vision glasses and binoculars."

Asked how France could have been unaware of the enemy's capacity, Guidère said: "It's true that the last important [weapons] acquisitions were on the black market and recent, but expressing astonishment is also part of the ministry of defence's communications operation. How else to justify the loss of a soldier so quickly, and the knocking out of a Mirage 2000 fighter jet against people with only Kalashnikovs."

A US defense report has called for contingency planning to neutralize a vast Chinese tunnel network with both “conventional and nuclear forces.” James Corbett told RT the “Underground Great Wall” scare is being used to mask US nuclear ambitions.

Orders for the Commander of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to submit a report on means of nullifying China’s underground tunnel network were outlined in the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by President Barack Obama on January 2.

The NDAA-directed report will further seek to identify knowledge gaps regarding China’s nuclear weapons programs, a request which was likely spurred by a controversial 2011 study out of Georgetown University entitled “Strategic Implications of China’s Underground Great Wall.”

The researchers claimed that China’s Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the country’s military tasked with protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, had dug some 3,000 miles of tunnels which currently housed up to 3,000 nuclear warheads – ten times US intelligence estimates.

The report drew a firestorm of criticism via its unconventional Internet-based research methods, which relied on Google Earth, blogs, military journals and even a fictional television program about Chinese artillery soldiers, to reach its conclusions.
But the questionable conclusions of the Georgetown report and Washington’s drive to more properly assess China’s military capability, are more reflective of Washington’s own ‘nuclear strategy’ than Beijing’s ambitions, James Corbett, editor of the Japanese-based Corbett Report news website, argues.