Malian soldiers fight while clashes erupted in the city of Gao on February 21, 2013 and an apparent car bomb struck near a camp housing French troops as Malian and foreign forces struggled to secure Mali's volatile north against Islamist rebels. #

Shopkeeper Mohamed Toure pours water on a fire in his destroyed shop at the main market in Gao February 23, 2013. The market was destroyed during fighting between Islamists and the Malian and French armies on Thursday. #

People search for goods at the Gao market, which reportedly burnt on February 21 during an Islamist attack on the northern city, on February 24, 2013. Malian troops were battling armed rebels in Gao in clashes that left the main courthouse in flames, after fighting erupted overnight with heavy gunfire reported around two main entrances to the city. #

Malian chief of Gao's gendarmerie district, Colonel Salhiou Maiga poses in the office of the Gao's gendarmerie in Gao, on February 24, 2013. After recapturing the north's cities from the Al Qaeda groups that had controlled them since April 2012, the six-week-long French-led offensive took the fight to the retreating Islamist insurgents' toughest desert bastions. #

Tuareg Malian soldiers under the command of Colonel El-Hadj Ag Gamou patrol the streets of Gao, northern Mali, on February 16 2013. After 10 months of forced exile to Niger, Gamou returned to help French and African forces flush jihadists from the region. #

French army deminers secure a helicopter in a hangar at the Gao airport, on February 9, 2013. Two Malian soldiers and four civilians have already been killed by landmines, and French troops are still fighting off what Paris called "residual jihadists" in reclaimed territory. #

A Malian soldier is pictured near the market in Gao, on February 22, 2013. Five people, including two suicide bombers, died Friday in car bombings in northern Mali, a day after fierce urban battles between French-led forces and Islamists left up to 20 extremists dead, officials said. #

Malian soldiers stand by the remains of a motorcycle used by a suicide bomber at the entrance of Gao, Mali, on February 8, 2013, It was the first known time a suicide bomber had operated in Mali. #

Travelers driving from Niamey, Niger, line up to be searched at the entrance of Gao, on February 12, 2013. Soldiers from Niger and Mali patrolled downtown Gao on foot, combing the sand footpaths through empty market stalls to prevent radical Islamic fighters from returning to this embattled city. #

A Young Malian girl walks in a Madrassa, or koranic school in Gao, on February 13, 2013. French soldiers on Wednesday recovered an enormous stash of explosives that authorities believe radical Islamic fighters were using to make bombs for attacks on northern Mali's largest city, a Malian military spokesman said. Daouda Diarra said that the French military removed some 800 kilograms (1,700 pounds) of explosive materials from a house in Gao's Chateau neighborhood. #

Malian soldiers fire a large weapon in Gao, on February 21, 2013. French and Malian troops fought Islamists on the streets of Gao, as fighting showed little sign of abating weeks before France plans to start withdrawing some forces. #

Resident Mohamed Alassane stands in a room where he and other locals say al Qaeda held European hostages, at the Ministry of Finance's Regional Audit Department, in Timbuktu, Mali, on February 6, 2013. Alassane and a doctor from the local hospital said the wheelchair had been used by an injured Islamist. In the same building, occupied by Islamists for more than a year, the AP found a more than 10-page letter signed by Abdelmalek Droukdel, the senior commander appointed by Osama bin Laden to run al-Qaeda's branch in Africa. The confidential letter spelled out the terror network's blueprint for conquering this desert nation. #

A suspected member of Islamist rebel group the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, MUJAO, sticks his hand out of a cell where suspected fighters are held in Gao, on February 11 2013, one day after MUJAO fighters engaged in a firefight with Malian forces. The attack in Gao shows the Islamic fighters, many of them well armed and with combat experience, are determined and daring and it foreshadows a protracted campaign by France and other nations to restore government control in this vast Saharan nation in northwest Africa. #

Children gather at the door of Mohamed Salia's madrassa in Gao, on February 18, 2013. Nearly a month after the al-Qaeda-linked militants were driven out of Gao and into the surrounding villages, students are now returning to the city's Quranic schools. Many classrooms, though, are still half full, as tens of thousands of people fled the fighting and strict Islamic rule imposed by the extremists. #

Ani Boka Arby weeps as the body of her husband, Mohamed Lamine, was unearthed in Timbuktu, Mali, on Friday February 8, 2013. Lamine, an Arab, was last seen being led away at gunpoint by Malian soldiers on January 28. Children found his body and that of another Arab man days later, lying facedown in the side of a dune on the outskirts of this desert capital. Human rights groups have warned that the military intervention to take back the territory in Mali's north could open the door to reprisals killings. Especially vulnerable are ethnic minorities suspected of having supported the extremists, including the country's Arabs. #