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| - French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday called for heightened efforts to "decapitate" Al-Qaeda-linked groups in the Sahel region, which is struggling with a grinding Islamist insurgency. Speaking to the presidents of five Sahel nations, Macron singled out the Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM). He named its two leaders, Iyad Ag Ghaly and Amadou Koufa, as "enemies" and ruled out any possibility of talks with them. Here are portraits of the two: Under Iyad Ag Ghaly, the shadowy GSIM has overtaken its sworn enemy, the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), to become the greatest jihadist threat in the region and one of Al-Qaeda's most active affiliates anywhere. The GSIM was formed in 2017 when several jihadist groups teamed up under Ag Ghaly. Those groups included Ansar Dine, which Ag Ghaly formed in 2012; the Katiba Macina, created by radical preacher Amadou Koufa in 2015; and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which was led by Abdelmalek Droukdel until he was killed by French forces last June. Born into the Ifogha tribal group in Mali's northern region of Kidal, the charismatic Ag Ghaly has long wielded influence in the Sahel. After leading a Tuareg rebellion against the Malian government in the 1990s, he withdrew from the scene for several years, concentrating on business affairs, before returning in 2012. He formed Ansar Dine, which joined up with Tuareg rebel group MNLA to take control of vast swathes of northern Mali. Ansar Dine then took over, and several cities remained under jihadist control until the French military intervened in 2013. "Iyad Ag Ghaly embodies Al-Qaeda's strategy in the Sahel," the head of France's external intelligence agency, Bernard Emie, said on February 1, in a rare public comment. "He's not a man who thinks about terrorism -- he is a man who practices it on a daily basis... he doesn't hesitate to take up arms himself." Amadou Koufa is subordinate to Ag Ghaly within the GSIM, but he has become increasingly prominent since forming the Katiba Macina in 2015. Coming from the Fulani, or Peul, community, he has inflamed age-old tensions between herders and farmers and among ethnic groups in central Mali. The region has become one of the flashpoints in the Sahel's jihadist crisis, with attacks there almost daily. France believed it had killed Koufa in a military operation in 2018, but he reappeared in a video a few months later. GSIM's swift and brutal rise has led some experts to argue that it is an unavoidable partner in -- or the biggest obstacle to -- any peace negotiations in the Sahel. But attempts to negotiate with Ag Ghaly and Koufa have brought no tangible results and attacks against soldiers, both local and foreign, have not relented. bur/siu/ah/jhd/dl/ri
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