There is one point that I would argue: that this skirmish was a humiliation for the Mali Army. All things considered I think that the Mali fought as good of a fight that you can expect out of such a poorly trained force.
As far as I can tell from the video the Mali force only took one casuality: the silly major who was arguing, in the street, with a subordinate, IN THE STREET, while UNDER observation of the enemy. Sorry, but that was plain dumb and it doesn't fairly reflect on the Mali Army, just that poor twit of an officer.
In fact, I get the impression that the "officer" on-site, the reporter called him a corporal, had things under control. Yeah, his men were doping around and spraying fire everywhere, but he kept them under control, for the most part, and did what any decent officer should do: he clarified the situation and took direct action!
The opening minutes of the film showed him trying to establish the "contact" by locating and fixing the enemy. There was a lot of recon by fire but it got the job done because the French, in the second video, didn't have to do much recon. It looks like the Mali were able to get the French on target and the French wrapped things up. Heck, in war like this, just locating the enemy and fixing his positions is very tough and the Mali officer on the spot did that and he did it without visible casualties to his force.
He then organized his troops, as well as you can with such an irregular force, and launched a combined arms assault on the enemy position. I get the impression that, due to his irregular's lack of fire discipline, he wasn't able to establish fire superiority over the enemy, so a direct assault on the position would have caused excessive losses… plus his armor bugging out didn't help at all! Sheesh, what are those people? Armored FIGHTING Vehicle crews or glorified bus drivers????? Come on guys, you're making us mechanized troops look bad in front of a bunch of crunchies!!!
So really the commander on the spot really did a decent job and his troops did well too! They all seemed game to take it to the enemy and they appeared to willing to stay and fight it out. Granted they pulled back in the end but it wasn't a rout.
At the end of the day they simply didn't have the training to pull off an operation like this, at least not without taking excessive casualties. But what they did was some pretty decent soldering when you consider that they were undertrained/poorly trained troops.
So I disagree with the humiliation comment. But it does highlight the state of the Mali Army. If this is an average unit in that army then they have a LOT of training to do before they can be reasonably expected to face fanatical irregulars in the field.
bases up the rifle teams.
