Mali has been crippled by instability since January, 2012, when rebels and Al Qaeda-linked militants, armed with the remnants of late Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s arsenal, began advancing through the country’s vast desert in the north and capturing towns. Not much has been made in American and Western media of this attack. Most of the dead were Malians, Russians, and Chinese and, again it was in Africa.
Two Mondays back, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at a concert in Manchester killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anti-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, as Max Blumenthal puts it, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”
