The world’s most dangerous U.N. mission : The al-Qaeda threat in Mali presents a new challenge to U.N. peacekeepers

GAO, Mali

Since World War II, U.N. peacekeepers have been dispatched to 69 conflicts — civil wars, border disputes and failed states. But now they are confronting an unsettling new threat: al-Qaeda.

Here in the vast, lawless desert of northwest Africa, their convoys are being torn apart by improvised explosive devices and their compounds blasted by 1,000-pound car bombs. It is a crisis that looks more like the U.S. ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than the cease-fires traditionally monitored by U.N. missions. In the past four years, 118 peacekeepers have been killed — making the U.N. mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, the world body’s deadliest ongoing peace operation. The bloodshed has raised questions about how an institution developed in the 1940s can serve a world under threat from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The issue is especially potent given the expectation that U.N. peacekeepers will eventually go to places such as Syria and Libya. “We are trying to learn these lessons here, rather than in Iraq, Libya or Syria,” said Dutch Col. Mike Kerkhove, commander of the U.N. intelligence unit in Mali. “This is not the end of this type of mission. It’s the beginning.” In 2012, Islamist radicals linked to al-Qaeda hijacked an uprising by ethnic Tuareg people and went on to seize cities across northern Mali, holding on for nearly a year until they were forced out by a French military intervention. When 11,000 U.N. troops arrived in 2013, they were meant to protect a fledgling peace deal and train the Malian army. But Islamist extremists regrouped across the region. It did not take long before the militants started targeting peacekeepers, whom they dubbed “Crusader occupation forces.” [caption id="attachment_2064962" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] A U.N. police officer stands guard on a night patrol in the northern city of Timbuktu. The U.N. mission in Mali marks the first time a significant peacekeeping contingent has been sent to help a state regain control over areas contested by terrorist groups.[/caption] The United Nations was remarkably unprepared for the threat. Most of its troops from Africa and South Asia brought tanks and vehicles that were easy targets for explosives, unlike U.S. mine-resistant vehicles. The U.N. compounds, dotted with metal storage containers turned into offices­ and bedrooms, had flimsy perimeter security and were vulnerable to the massive car bombs used by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the regional affiliate of the extremist group. For a while, U.N. forces­ didn’t have a single attack helicopter. “We weren’t ready for these challenges,” said Mohamed El-Amine Souef, a native of the Comoros Islands who is the top U.N. official in Gao, a city in northern Mali. Last year, Souef’s compound was struck by a suicide bomber, the shrapnel battering his front door. But the United Nations’ dilemma goes beyond a lack of preparation or anti-terrorism equipment. At its New York headquarters and around the world, diplomats are debating: Should U.N. forces be engaged in counterterrorism at all? “It’s time for us to realize that this kind of front-line role is central to the future of the United Nations,” said Peter Yeo, a senior official at the U.N. Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that supports the goals of the world body. Yeo and others argue that without a counterterrorism capability, U.N. peacekeepers can’t operate productively in many of the world’s war zones. But critics say that such a role would violate the peacekeepers’ core principle of impartiality and ultimately make them less effective. “Peacekeepers are only meant to use deadly force to protect civilians or to stop spoilers from threatening a peace process, not to pursue any group’s military defeat,” said Aditi Gorur, director of the Protecting Civilians in Conflict program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based research center.

---

---

---

If peacekeepers had a more aggressive counterterrorism mandate, she and others argue, that could hurt the United Nations’ ability to mediate between warring groups, which sometimes include violent Islamists.

Already in Mali, the International Committee of the Red Cross has described the United Nations as a “party to the conflict.”

In the slide-show presentation he shows to visitors at his base in Bamako, the capital of Mali, Kerkhove includes an aerial photo taken last year of a compound that appeared to be used by a terrorist group. When he received the photo, Kerkhove debated what to do.

The men inside might be planning an assault on U.N. personnel, he thought, or a strike against civilians. Over the past two years, extremist groups have used Mali as a staging ground for attacks on luxury hotels, beach resorts and restaurants in West Africa. In 2016, al-Qaeda and its allies and affiliates launched at least 257 attacks in the region, according to the Long War Journal. But Kerkhove knew that the nearest battalion of U.N. troops, from Senegal, didn’t have the weapons or air support to engage in a fight with trans­national terrorists. Ultimately, U.N. forces­ decided not to approach the compound. The Mali mission is the only one of the 16 active U.N. peacekeeping operations that authorizes troops to deter and counter “asymmetric threats” — that is, terrorist groups — that could harm its work or civilians. Last year, the U.N. Security Council said the mission should become “more proactive and robust” — language that some read as encouraging more offensive operations.