10/18/2012 15:27 GMT
PARIS, Oct 18, 2012 (AFP) - The head of a group representing elected officials in Mali's desert north called Thursday for urgent Western military intervention to remove Islamists who have seized control of the area.
"There must be an urgent intervention of Western forces," Elhadj Baba Haidara, the head of the North Mali Collective of Elected Officials, told journalists in Paris, warning that delays were giving the Islamists time to consolidate their hold on the region.
"They have ways of indoctrinating the population, with fear, with conviction, with force or with money," said Haidara, the elected deputy for the city of Timbuktu.
International talks are to begin in Mali's capital Bamako on Friday on a possible foreign intervention to seize back the swathes of the desert north now under Islamist control.
Once considered one of Africa's most stable countries, Mali was plunged into chaos by a March coup that overthrew the government of president Amadou Toumani Toure.
A series of Islamist groups including Al-Qaeda's north African branch capitalised on the power vacuum to seize the country's desert north, an area larger than France.
The Islamists have been imposing their strict version of sharia law on areas under their control, arresting unveiled women, stoning an unmarried couple to death, publicly flogging smokers and amputating suspected thieves' limbs, according to residents and rights groups.
On Thursday, the Islamists were also destroying more Muslim saints' tombs in the ancient city of Timbuktu, witnesses said, in the latest attack on the world heritage sites considered blasphemous by the jihadists.
But they have also been making inroads with the local population and Haissata Cisse-Haidara, the deputy for Bourem near the northern city of Gao, said an intervention was needed rapidly.
"The international community has the responsibility to act very quickly because people are starting to rally to the terrorists," she said, adding that in Gao the Islamists were winning support by providing money for food and electricity.
New African Union chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Mali's interim president Dioncounda Traore and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's special envoy for the region, Romano Prodi, are all expected at Friday's talks.
On October 12, the UN Security Council passed a resolution asking West African nations to speed up preparations for an international intervention and giving them 45 days to lay out detailed plans.
West African group ECOWAS has said it has 3,000 troops on standby for a mission to reclaim the north.
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