The US-led Western Mainstream Media’s rebranding of Malian terrorists as “fighters/militants/rebels” (albeit extremist/jihadi ones) in the past few months since that country demanded the withdrawal of French forces was in hindsight meant to precondition the public for this very moment.
Mali appears doomed to become the scene of the latest Russian-Western proxy war exactly as the author predicted after it turns out that this country’s Al Qaeda branch just declared war on Russia. Reuters reported that the terrorists, which it conspicuously refuses to describe as such but instead opts for the more publicly acceptable “fighter/militant”, claimed that Friday’s attack was supposedly in response to the junta’s agreement to host Wager trainers.
In all actuality, the US-led Western Mainstream Media’s (MSM) rebranding of Malian terrorists as “fighters/militants/rebels” (albeit extremist/jihadi ones) in the past few months since that country demanded the withdrawal of French forces was in hindsight meant to precondition the public for this very moment. Instead of France withdrawing in shame after failing to defeat terrorists there despite supposedly trying for over a decade, it can now claim that no such terrorists really exist there anymore.
Rather, all that’s left are supposedly formerly terrorist remnants that have “moderated” their views to now become “fighters/militants/rebels”, who in turn deserve foreign support if they’re allegedly fighting a so-called “national liberation campaign” against what the MSM will predictably misportray as “Russian occupation”. It was terrorism when these same groups fought French and UN forces, but now it’s just another run-of-the-mill “insurgent attack” since Russia’s the one being targeted.
What’s so remarkable about the MSM’s narrative reversal on the Malian Conflict is how swiftly it happened, taking advantage of the general public’s lack of awareness of this war to flip everything around before anyone realized what was going on. That’s why this just took a handful of articles spread over a couple of months before it became “publicly acceptable” for Al Qaeda to attack anyone instead of this being universally condemnable like it hitherto had been prior to the Hybrid War of Terror on Syria.
Even during that conflict, however, the MSM still went to great lengths to convince the Western public that the so-called “moderate rebels” were allegedly different from Al Qaeda and ISIS despite in many cases being indistinguishable from them and even part of those very same terrorist groups. This time, though, there are no “embedded journalists” or “White Helmets” (at least not yet) because there’s been scant coverage of this conflict so far from either the MSM or the Alt-Media Community (AMC).
That in turn made it much easier to turn everything around by suddenly rebranding Al Qaeda as the “good guys” during the latest phase of the Malian Conflict, which takes advantage of the global public’s dearth of information about it over the past decade. As it presently stands, the MSM isn’t openly celebrating the declaration of war on Russia by that terrorist group’s Malian branch, but it isn’t condemning it either, which says all that one needs to about their sympathies.
France’s inglorious defeat, which some Malians don’t even consider as such since they suspect that it never even really intended to fight terrorism in the first place but rather exploit it to advance their fading unipolar hegemonic goals, is now transforming into Western strategic leverage. The remaining terrorists in Mali are now behaving as anti-Russian proxies and have thus since been rebranded as “fighters/insurgents/militants/rebels” in order to boost Western public support for their direct backing.
The Golden Billion, led by France when it comes to this bloc’s West African operations, is exploiting the pretext of Wagner trainers in Mali to sell this latest proxy war to their people by playing on their imaginations of what those two sides’ military cooperation supposedly implies. Although details are scarce about what exactly it all entails, it does indeed seem as though some training is involved, though it’s unclear whether the group is participating in battlefield operations.
Regardless of whatever may or may not be going on, the scale of Wagner’s presence in that country isn’t estimated to be all that large, plus it’s legitimate since it’s agreed to by the host state whether the West likes it or not. Furthermore, while Wagner’s support can make a major difference for partnered militaries like its close ones in the Central African Republic (CAR), it’s ultimately those same partners who are responsible for the success of their anti-terrorist operations, not Wagner in and of itself.
What this means is that Wagner is just a cover for the terrorists to justify carrying out their first-ever attack against Mali’s largest military base, which hasn’t happened before in ten years of fighting. The timing coincides with France’s withdrawal from the country and these same terrorists’ rebranding as “rebels” by the MSM. These interconnected developments are meant to justify the public provision of support to them by Western governments in the coming future on an anti-Russian pretext.
Everything thus far points to an intensified Russian-Western proxy war in Mali, especially in the event that Wagner trainers are injured or killed by Al Qaeda terrorists. France wants to reverse the anti-imperialist success of last year’s Malian coup that brought to power a patriotic junta that shares Russia’s multipolar worldview, hence why it’s now employing those same terrorists that it supposedly fought for a decade as its latest regional proxies. For all intents and purposes, a Syria 2.0 seems to be unfolding.