The funeral of French Foreign Legion Sergeant Marcel Kalafut was held in May at Camp Raffalli, his regimental headquarters in Calvi, Corsica. The 26-year-old was killed when his vehicle hit a land mine during a covert operation in northern Mali, reports Newsweek.
France’s minister of defense, Jean-Yves Le Drian, paid tribute to the young noncommissioned officer, saying he had “died for France,” and posthumously awarded him France’s most valued medal, the Légion d’Honneur.
Kalafut was the eighth French soldier killed in combat in Mali since French forces intervened in January last year. The ninth, also a Legionnaire, was killed in July. At Kalafut’s funeral, Le Drian said 1,000 French soldiers would remain in Mali and 3,000 in the Sahel-Sahara zone “for as long as necessary.”
More than 50 years after granting its colonial empire independence, it seems Paris cannot keep its nose out of Africa. French military engagement there is much more wide-ranging than just battling Islamist insurgents in Mali. French forces are active in at least 10 African countries. In May, the government detailed plans to reinforce them, with regional centers in Chad, Burkina Faso, northern Mali and Côte d’Ivoire.
Along with the 2,000 troops France has sent to help restore order in the chaotic Central African Republic, more than 5,500 are tasked with fighting armed terrorist groups, intelligence gathering, training the local military and providing rapid reaction forces. A nongovernment source estimates that France has 10,000 troops stationed in Africa.
A confidential French Senate report recommends that the special forces’ strength be boosted by 25 percent, from 3,000 to 4,000. “They constitute an appropriate response to conflicts France will probably face in the next 10 years,” the authors concluded. Again, the focus was on Africa.
You could be forgiven for thinking this sounds like a 21st century remake of Beau Geste, the ripping yarn about honor and heroism in the French Foreign Legion. Same desert, same sand, same godforsaken outposts. And even some of the same opponents, such as the rebellious Tuareg nomads still battling for autonomy.
This time Paris justified military intervention in Mali—after the country’s northern half had been overrun by an uneasy alliance of Tuareg rebels and Muslim extremists of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—by saying it was invited by the beleaguered government and was acting with U.N. Security Council approval. But the intervention was less about derailing the Tuaregs’ bid for autonomy than containing militant Islam amid fears that the Sahel region will become a breeding ground for Al-Qaeda terrorism that could spill into France and the rest of Europe.
The French national defense strategy outlined last year stressed the importance of “Europe’s neighborhood”—the zone from Mauritania to the Horn of Africa. African countries have a “low capacity” to control their own territories, the paper said, and fragile countries risk becoming safe havens for terrorists.
A decade before, the U.S. was saying much the same thing. In the aftermath of 9/11, Washington launched “the Trans Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative” to train local forces in nine Saharan and sub-Saharan countries and establish semipermanent U.S. bases in each.
Read more of this report from Newsweek.