Mali, officially the Republic of Mali, is a landlocked country in West Africa. Mali is bordered by Algeria to the north, Niger to the east, Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire to the south, Guinea to the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania to the west. Its size is just over 1,24... Explore this topic

The Tuareg are a Berber people with a traditionally nomadic pastoralist lifestyle. They are the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa. The Tuareg language, a branch of the Berber language, has an estimated 1.2 million speakers. About half this number is... Explore this topic

Politics of Mali takes place in a framework of a presidential representative democratic republic, whereby the President of Mali is head of state with a Presidentially appointed Prime Minister as the head of government, and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised ... Explore this topic

The 2012 Malian coup d'état began on 21 March, when mutinying Malian soldiers, displeased with the management of the Tuareg rebellion, attacked several locations in the capital Bamako, including the presidential palace, state television, and military barracks. The soldiers, wh... Explore this topic

Ansar Dine means "helpers of the religion" or "defenders of the faith" in Arabic. Ansar Dine is a militant Islamist group led by Iyad Ag Ghaly, one of the most prominent leaders of the Tuareg rebellion in the 1990s. He is suspected of having ties with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic M... Explore this topic

Al-Qaeda is a global militant Islamist organization founded by Osama bin Laden at some point between August 1988 and late 1989, with its origins being traceable to the Soviet War in Afghanistan. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a rad... Explore this topic

Sharia is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia deals with many topics addressed by secular law, including crime, politics, and economics, as well as personal matters such as sexual intercourse, hygiene, diet, prayer, and fasting. Though interpretations of sharia v... Explore this topic

A coup d'état, also known as a coup, a putsch, or an overthrow, is the sudden deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to depose the extant government and replace it with another body, civil or military. A ... Explore this topic

Timbuktu, formerly also spelled Timbuctoo and Timbuktoo, is a town in the West African nation of Mali situated 20 km north of the River Niger on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. The town is the capital of the Timbuktu Region, one of the eight administrative regions of M... Explore this topic

Islamism is a set of ideologies holding that "Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life". Islamism is a controversial neologism, and definitions of it sometimes vary. Leading Islamist thinkers emphasize the implementation of Sharia; of pan-Islamic politi... Explore this topic