It is strange, really, how the destruction of buildings and inanimate objects can sometimes capture the world’s attention in ways that ordinary, simple human suffering does not. Northern Mali, like much of Saharan and Sahelian Africa, has long been home to endemic hunger, poverty and civil strife. All have been greatly exacerbated over the past three months, as a late-March coup in Bamako has facilitated a Tuareg revolt, which in turn has provided an opportunity to Islamic extremists to seize significant swaths of territory and to impose their obscurantist norms on an unwilling Muslim population.
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