Operation Serval it had lost a few days earlier. French airstrikes appeared to stop the rebel advance to the south which prompted the intervention and destroyed an Ansar Dine command post near Konna. France asked the U.S. to speed up its contribution by sending drones to improve surveillance over the vast area of northern Mali. The Pentagon was reported to have studied the French request. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom announced that his country would lend logistical support to the operation. ECOWAS troops preparing to deploy to Mali also decided to move up their arrival date to January 14
British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War feasible. Over the following days, there was debate within the British government as to what the aims of a military deployment to Sierra Leone would be. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) advocated a full-scale intervention to assist UNAMSIL, arguing that a non-combatant evacuation operation would not be sufficient and would undermine the UN, but the MoD believed that the armed forces would be unable to sustain a larger-scale operation. The British government's emergency committee, COBRA, was convened and presented with three options for an evacuation of entitled persons—deployment of aircraft and special forces to conduct an evacuation via Lungi