France may start Mali pullout in March

By Baba Ahmed and Angela Charlton, Associated Press, February 6, 2013

France’s foreign minister said in a newspaper interview that his country’s troops may start pulling out of a military intervention in the African country of Mali in March.

Laurent Fabius is quoted in France’s Metro newspaper as saying, “I think that starting in March, if everything goes as planned, the number of our troops should diminish.”

The Metro report yesterday gave no firm figures or dates for the pullout.

France has some 4,000 troops in Mali in an intervention that started last month against Islamist extremists who had seized the north of the country last year.