Operation Barkhane rebellion against the central Malian government was exploited by Islamist groups who gained control over the northern half of the country. In response, France launched a military operation in January 2013 to stop the Islamist offensive from toppling the Malian government and to re-capture Northern Mali. The operation, codenamed Operation Serval, ended in the complete re-capture of all Islamist held territory by the operations conclusion on the 15 July 2014. Following the end of Operation Serval, France recognised the need to provide stability in the wider Sahel region by helping the region's various governments combat terrorism. The French defense minister,
Serval that no such specimen had been identified by him or his colleagues, and that it differed considerably from the common serval. In 1944, Pocock identified three races of the serval from northern Africa. Three subspecies are recognised as valid since 2017: The phylogenetic relationships of the serval have remained in dispute; in 1997, palaeontologists M. C. McKenna and S. K. Bell classified "Leptailurus" as a subgenus of "Felis", while others like O. R. P. Bininda-Edmonds (of the Technical University of Munich) have grouped it with "Felis", "Lynx" and "Caracal". Studies in the 2000s and the 2010s show that the serval,