here's a piece from 2006 about the american "front" in the "war on terror" in the sahara.
Foreign Policy in Focus | The Collapse of the Second Front
it's interesting for alot of reasons, not least the fictional battles involving fictional groups affiliated in fictional ways with potentially non-fictional groups the result of which may or may not have been alot of running around in northern mali/chad it's hard to say.
security theater:
Security theater - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia