Last November, a wave of violence engulfed the suburbs of many French cities.
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Violence on the outskirts of French cities is not the product of insufficiently firm policing but of the misery of life there.
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Fringed, like most French cities, by concrete social-housing blocks, Lille faces a catalogue of difficulties as bleak as it is familiar: drugs, gangs, joblessness, crime.
Now the contracts are coming up thick and fast, and Clear Channel has taken a number of important French cities, such as Montpellier, Nanterre and Annecy.
In the run-down suburbs around many French cities, reactions to the election result ranged from gloom to outright anger, as youths set cars on fire and skirmished with police.
Mr Bertrand also urged people to visit elderly friends, neighbours and relatives - especially those living on their own during the holiday season, when the French traditionally vacate the cities for the countryside, including many care workers, doctors and nurses.
Aguelhok is a remote town close to mountains and the Algerian border -- in a region where many Islamist fighters had regrouped in the face of the French push toward the main cities of the north.
French-led troops now control Timbuktu and Gao cities, along with a swath in between that was an Islamist stronghold for almost a year, the French Defense Ministry said.
French-led troops now control the cities of Timbuktu and Gao, along with a swath in between that was an Islamist stronghold for almost a year, the French Defense Ministry said.
French-led troops now control the cities of Timbuktu and Gao, along with the swath in between that was an Islamist stronghold for almost a year, the French Defense Ministry said this week.
Some towns and cities have been recaptured by French soldiers but a number of Islamist fighters are believed to remain in their desert hideouts in the north from where they launch isolated attacks against French and Malian forces.
French forces helped government troops recapture the main north cities and towns, and thousands of soldiers from African countries have also been deployed.
Col Burkhard told the BBC that Malian and other African troops - not French forces - would be in charge of holding on to cities after they had been recaptured from militant forces.
The BBC's Mark Doyle in Mali says a big international troop build-up is continuing ahead of a probable French-led air and ground offensive on Gao and other desert cities.
The race has previously started in the French locations of Paris, Arras, Marseille and Clermont-Ferrand and the Spanish cities of Barcelona and Granada.
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The French operations have been seen as successful in driving al Qaeda-linked militants out of key Malian cities, but some have regrouped in the Sahara, say U.S. officials.
While the main Tuareg rebel group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (known by its French acronym, MNLA), did much of the early fighting, Ansar Dine took control of cities such as Timbuktu as government forces fled.
"This advance by the Malian army toward the cities held by their enemies constitutes a certain military success for the Bamako government and for French forces, who have intervened in support of these operations, " French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said.
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