The city of Gao in Mali was recently freed from Islamist militants who had imposed strict Islamic Sharia law on the region for the previous ten months. As residents begin to recover a fragile sense of security, the sheer scale of the terror inflicted on the community is also beginning to sink in. Amid the current celebratory mood there is also the lingering fear that that the Islamists could one day come back- according to some - like a nightmare in the dead of the night. French military intervention in Mali has so far succeeded in securing control of all the previously Islamist-held cities in northern Mali, but the operation has failed to net any significant numbers of Islamist prisoners. Nor have there been any significant military confrontations - instead, the Islamist forces have literally melted away in the face of the French-led advance.
