Last updated: December 28, 2014


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France seeks UN peacekeepers for Mali

A French tank heading to Gao

French and Malian troops have clashed with Islamist rebels as they attempt to reclaim northern Mali. Source: AAP

FRANCE has urged the United Nations to send peacekeepers to Mali, where French forces have killed hundreds of Islamist rebels but are still coming under attack in territory reclaimed from the extremists.

After announcing plans to start withdrawing its 4,000 troops from Mali in March, France called for deploying a UN peacekeeping force to take the baton, the French ambassador to the world body said after closed Security Council talks on the crisis.

Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said a peacekeeping force could be in place by April, incorporating troops being deployed under the banner of a West African intervention force, AFISMA, into a UN peacekeeping mission.

"Once security is assured, we can certainly envisage, without changing the structures, that this takes place in the framework of a peacekeeping operation," Fabius told journalists in Paris.

"This gives the advantage of being under the umbrella of the United Nations, under its financing," he said.

"This doesn't mean at all that the organisation would be modified, it would simply be under the general umbrella of the UN."

UN ambassador Gerard Araud said it would take "several weeks" to make an assessment on when French troops can hand over to peacekeepers.

France launched a surprise intervention in its former colony on January 11 as a triad of Islamist groups that had seized control of the north in the aftermath of a military coup pushed south toward the capital Bamako.

French-led forces have largely pushed the rebels back to remote mountains near the Algerian border but are still being attacked in retaken territory, raising fears of a prolonged insurgency.

French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the rebels had hit back at troops with rocket fire on Tuesday in Gao, the largest northern city.

"Once our troops, supported by Malian forces, started patrols around the towns that we have taken, they met residual jihadist groups who are still fighting," Le Drian said on Europe 1 radio.

"The combat isn't over. The attacks are going to continue," a spokesman for the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) told AFP.

The Malian army arrested two young men in Gao's market on Wednesday who were brandishing two grenades and a pistol, though it was unclear "whether they planned to commit an attack or wanted to use the weapons for robbery", a police spokesman said.

On Tuesday, Le Drian said the French-led operation had so far killed "several hundred" al Qaeda-linked militants.

France's sole fatality so far has been a helicopter pilot killed at the start of the operation.

French President Francois Hollande, who has vowed to stay in Mali as long as it takes, said a drawdown of troops would begin in March "if everything goes to plan", a spokeswoman said.