Armed Humanitarians
“The soldiers, wearing a motley assortment of khaki and forest-green camouflage, fanned out in the dirt, Kalashnikovs at the ready. A small group of boys who had been rolling old bicycle tires around the mud-walled courtyard stopped to watch the soldiers as they inched forward in the dirt, ready to return fire.
Captain Lassine Keita, a reed-thin officer in pressed desert fatigues, urged the soldiers on, and his men leapfrogged toward the ambush point to launch their counterattack. Then Keita, his spectacles pushed back on his forehead like a professor, stepped forward and waved his arms to stop the drill. The troopers clambered back in the pickup and prepared to make another circuit around the yard.
Keita was commander of the 512th Compagnie d’Infanterie Motorisée, a Malian infantry unit that in 2007 was patrolling the country’s Fifth Military Region, a vast territory that stretched across the northern deserts of Mali, reaching all the way to the borders of Algeria and Mauritania. The ...512th was stationed at what some would consider the end of the world.MoreLess
Captain Lassine Keita, a reed-thin officer in pressed desert fatigues, urged the soldiers on, and his men leapfrogged toward the ambush point to launch their counterattack. Then Keita, his spectacles pushed back on his forehead like a professor, stepped forward and waved his arms to stop the drill. The troopers clambered back in the pickup and prepared to make another circuit around the yard.
Keita was commander of the 512th Compagnie d’Infanterie Motorisée, a Malian infantry unit that in 2007 was patrolling the country’s Fifth Military Region, a vast territory that stretched across the northern deserts of Mali, reaching all the way to the borders of Algeria and Mauritania. The ...512th was stationed at what some would consider the end of the world.MoreLess
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