France announced on Thursday that it would pull out its troops from the West African nation of Mali, bringing to a bitter end a nine-year military mission that has failed to quash a terrorist threat in the increasingly unstable region and has undermined France's once dominant standing in many of its former African colonies, reports agencies.
The announcement followed a rapid breakdown in relations between France and Mali's military rulers, and it threw into uncertainty regional anti-terrorism operations spearheaded by France and backed by Western allies.
Jihadi groups have continued to spread across Mali and neighboring countries, as France's military presence has grown increasingly unpopular. Mali's leaders, to France's great chagrin, have turned for help to Russia - a resurgent power on the continent that had already supplanted France's dominance in another former colony, the Central African Republic.
France's pullout from Mali had been dreaded in Paris, not only for its geopolitical implications, but also for its powerful symbolism: a humiliating withdrawal of French soldiers from a part of the world where its influence long stood unchallenged, but where it is quickly eroding before newcomers that include China, Turkey and Germany - as well as Russia.
The withdrawal of troops had appeared inevitable in recent weeks, after the French foreign minister called Mali's military leaders "out of control," and they retaliated by expelling the French ambassador, who was given only 72 hours to leave Malian soil.
With presidential elections in France less than two months away, the French government had hoped to avoid any comparisons to the chaotic pullout by American troops from Afghanistan last year. France was careful to make the announcement after meeting with African leaders the night before and to portray the development as a "coordinated withdrawal" of France and its allies.
At a news conference, President Emmanuel Macron of France expressed frustration with Mali's leaders - who came to power after two successive coups in the last 20 months - and said that the breakdown in relations had prompted France and its allies to rethink their strategy and reorganise their forces.
"We cannot remain militarily engaged with de facto authorities whose strategy and hidden objectives we do not share," Macron said at the news conference Thursday, which came after a dinner Wednesday evening between the French leader and Western and African counterparts, and ahead of a summit between European Union and African Union leaders in Brussels.
But in Mali and in the rest of the region, the pullout will be seen as a defeat - not just of any foreign power, but of France, which, in its complicated post-colonial relations with its former colonies, still looms large in the lives and minds of many Africans.
"They may be saying that they're choosing to leave, but really from the Malian perspective, they're being kicked out," said Hannah Armstrong, an independent analyst focused on the Sahel region, a wide strip of land that cuts across Africa just below the Sahara.
France's hasty retreat will likely be hailed as a major victory by the jihadi groups: The withdrawal of foreign forces is one of their two main demands, along with a transformation of society and politics in line with their strict interpretation of Shariah law, said Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, a Sahel analyst for the International Crisis Group.
But it could also be welcomed by Mali's military rulers, who have capitalised on growing anti-France sentiment by the Malian public, which holds France partly responsible for worsening security, and corruption among the political elites that the military overthrew.
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