Kuwaitis Stage Protest Rally against France’s Military Intervention in Mali

Young Kuwaiti people staged a rally outside the French embassy in al-Mansouriya district in the capital city of Kuwait on Tuesday to protest at Paris’s military intervention in Mali.

Hundreds of Kuwaiti youths carried placards and chanted slogans to condemn France’s interference and military attack on a Muslim country’s territory.

They described the French military intervention in Mali as “Crusader Terrorism”, and deplored the Arab and Muslim world’s silence on the aggression against a Muslim state.

Last week, armed groups in Northern Mali vowed to strike “at the heart of France” to avenge a fierce military offensive against them.

“France has attacked Islam. We will strike at the heart of France,” said a leader of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), an offshoot of AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb).

Asked where they would attack, Abou Dardar told AFP by telephone, “Everywhere. In Bamako, in Africa and in Europe. ”

Another MUJAO leader Omar Ould Hamaha, nicknamed “Redbeard”, warned on radio Europe 1 that France had “opened the doors of hell” with its intervention and faced a situation “worse than Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia”.

France intervened in the country on January 11 and caused heavy losses in the extremists’ ranks.