How bad are the bad guys in Mali? The answer, in four powerful paragraphs

By Max Fisher, WashPost, Updated: January 14, 2013

As the French military expands its campaign to halt the Islamist rebels who have already seized half of Mali, it’s worth asking: what makes these guys so bad that France intervened against them?

Mali’s Islamist rebels have earned a record for cruelty and barbarity since seizing the northern half of the country. That’s probably not the only reason France intervened (more on this in a later post), but it’s an important – and disturbing – part of the picture.

The Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan visited Mali recently, where he discovered just how brutal the Islamists’ rule had become. Here, from his December 11 story, is a glimpse into life under their rule:

SEGOU, Mali — On a sweltering afternoon, Islamist police officers dragged Fatima Al Hassan out of her house in the fabled city of Timbuktu. They beat her up, shoved her into a white pickup truck and drove her to their headquarters. She was locked up in a jail as she awaited her sentence: 100 lashes with an electrical cord.

(More here.)