The attack in Mali this week has refocused attention on radical terrorism in Africa. But is the anti-terror strategy working or backfiring? Lester Holloway gives his personal view

Shocking news that 30 people have been killed in the Malian capital Bamako, coming a week after the Paris atrocities that left 130 dead, adds yet more complexity to worldwide efforts to combat pseudo-Islamic terrorists.

French and United States troops took part in the battle at the Radisson Blu hotel on Friday, two years after Francois Hollande sent 4,000 troops to fight off al-Qaeda-linked militants in the northern half of the former French colony.

The absence of Western media reports since then might have led some to assume peace had descended, but the reality has been a string of comparatively low-level attacks in north and central Mali this year.

With terrorists active across the region it was only a matter of time before a larger incident took place. And the timing, coming so soon after Paris, surely cannot be a coincidence.

Speaking after the Algerian hostage siege in 2013 David Cameron warned that the north African terrorist threat ‘could last decades’. He might have added the Sahel, west, east and horn of Africa. Pretty much every African country north of the equator has been afflicted by al-Qaeda style misery.

Some have argued that the record of the West in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria has displaced terrorism to countries where they weren’t before. It is a lot more complicated than that.

After 2,000 years of peaceful Islam the last four decades in Africa has witnessed a rise in radical political extremism as disillusionment with repressive post-independence rulers and poverty fermented the anger of the disenfranchised against governments at home and abroad.

Islamic ‘insurgencies’ are relatively new to Mali and were not noted until 1997. In many ways they are the product of successive coup d’état‘s and the IMF-imposed trade liberalisation and structural adjustment plans.

Mali is a major gold exporter yet remains one of the poorest countries in the region. There can never be any excuse for violence and extremism, but nonetheless people without work, food and hope are more likely to become recruits to corrupted ideologies. Any wonder, then, that Osama bin Laden began his career of destruction living in Sudan in the early 1990s when Africa’s poverty and isolation were at their height.

The Pentagon were increasing the US military presence in Africa before the Algeria and Mali crises after a period of assessment by the US African Command, AFRICOM.

In West African the picture is every bit as complex as in Syria, with a plethora of radical groups such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon, Aqmi (al-Qaida au Maghrab) in Mali and Niger, and Ansar Dine and Mujao. Sometimes these groups fight each other. In fact there are, at last count, 43 terrorist groups from Mauritania to Somalia.

Mali is also complicated by the fact that some of the ‘insurgents’ whom the Malian army were fighting are actually from the Tuareg tribe, trained and armed by the US to oppose the Islamist radicals, but who then switched sides.

News accounts suggest US military and civilian employees were inside the Radisson Blu hotel when gunmen struck. A coincidence? We may never know. One thing is for sure, the US and France cannot win alone. This is Africa’s fight and the African Union must lead.

The AU’s new African Standby Force is not even operational yet and under-resourced. Military training provided by Western nations, including Britain, is bilateral and lacks the underpinning of a general commitment across African nations to tackle the cancer of terrorism that knows no boundaries, literally and figuratively.

For African leaders radical ‘Islamic’ attacks are a headache they want shot of but they are facing transnational terrorists who move effortlessly across borders, such as the Garissa attack by al-Shabaab Somalis in Kenya and Boko Haram who slip with ease between northeast Nigeria, Niger and the forests of Cameroon.

The West are simply playing whack-a-mole with short term interventions when particular situations become critical, and Africa will, understandably, not tolerate permanent visible forces from former colonial powers on their turf.

Military bases – France has eleven across the continent if you include sea patrols off the Somali coast – may be a temptation for terrorists rather than a deterrent. Likewise America’s surge in activity in Africa, including over 600 operations in 2014 and an escalation in drone attacks, acts more as a recruiting sergeant for terrorism than anything else.

Even bilateral military training is of little use if national troops are not backed by real political commitment from their own governments. It is safer to flee until backup arrives.

It is time for the African Union to get a grip on a problem that has now spread over half the continent.

For Mali, the troubles of the last two years have been a long time in the making. Equally tragic is that such a poor country was once so rich. The Songhai empire of the 14th to 16th centuries was at the epicentre of the West African golden age and was one of the most powerful trading nations. Even their slaves were kitted out in Persian silk.

In the 12th Century they built the earliest, and arguably to this day still the biggest, university in the world in Timbuktu, where 25,000 scholars from across African came to study, teach and write. Malians recorded that Islamic ruler Mansa Musa sent 2,000 ships across the Atlantic in 1311, 180 years before Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas.

Many ancient manuscripts documenting this history were burnt by extremists in 2013. That this great civilisation has fallen so far under French colonialism, and suffered so much since independence, is a tragedy.

Mali has vast reserves of gold, uranium, diamonds, bauxite and many more precious resources. It’s oil is yet to be seriously mined. What lies beneath Malians feet holds the key to future prosperity, but it cannot get there while religious extremism, the by-product of historical and modern injustice, holds it back.

Lester Holloway is Online Editor at the Runnymede Trust but is writing here in a personal capacity.