He said French planes were circling overhead and French and Malian forces were fighting the jihadists.
Earlier, Mr Le Drian said the jihadists had now scattered, marking a "turning-point" in France's intervention.
As international forces increase their pressure on Somali jihadists, some are likely to decamp to Yemen.
As Europe's prisons fill with jihadists, there are fears that radicalisation will spread among inmates.
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He has also sent his own troops into Sudan and against jihadists in Somalia.
The Egyptian military has been cooperating with Israel, particularly on intelligence matters involving jihadists in the Sinai.
The military operation in Mali scored quick successes, forcing the jihadists out of northern Mali's major cities.
University of Michigan professor and terrorism expert Scott Atran has also interviewed captured jihadists and would-be bombers.
America has not only to train its ally but also to convince it that jihadists are the real foe.
Egyptian officials believe the militants were known jihadists and members of the same Bedouin tribe, the Egyptian official said.
Egypt later launched air strikes against suspected jihadists nearby and claimed to have killed at least 20 of them.
Sheikh Sadeq Ahmar, head of the country's most powerful Hashed tribe, said Monday that he supports talks with the jihadists.
But as Iraq has grown less hospitable to al-Qaeda-style jihadists, the human flow has reversed, with many heading back to Lebanon.
Egypt's state news agency quoted a top security official who said the gunmen were "jihadists" who had infiltrated from the Gaza Strip.
Pirates have not directly filled the Shabab's coffers, though they may occasionally have been forced to pay the jihadists a lucrative levy.
His troops recently declared success in chasing jihadists from the southern town of Zinjibar, which they had occupied since June (see map).
American troops are overstretched, expensive and make attractive targets for jihadists, so it makes sense to train other forces to fight where they can.
Mr Molins also said that one of the detainees had acted as a contact for would-be jihadists while another had travelled to Egypt and Tunisia.
But the constant circulation of Somali-Americans back to Somalia to visit family or conduct business makes it hard for American intelligence to track would-be jihadists.
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Chad's participation in the fight against jihadists has come at a considerable cost: At least 23 Chadian soldiers were killed in one battle alone in February.
Some FSA commanders recently tried to expel a clutch of foreign jihadists who kidnapped a British and a Dutch journalist and held them for a week.
Three raids on Thursday killed 12 jihadists and destroyed large weapons caches near Jaar, in Abyan, with no losses among government forces, three security officials told CNN.
The French judge - who has been working on terrorism cases since 2000 - has no doubt that France is in the firing line of the jihadists.
But he said attacks like those will prove to be the jihadists' "Achilles' heel, " turning the population against them and driving them toward the concerned citizens' groups.
For the French back home and the West in general, he says his "ideal" would be that "everybody realize that we can't just let Africa fall" to jihadists.
Nations always prepare to fight their last war, and now Gates' Pentagon is thinking only about what the U.S. needs to defeat jihadists in sandy and rocky environments.
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Specifically, the willingness of Muslim secularists to form strategic relations with jihadists and the willingness of Shi'ites to form strategic partnerships with Sunnis was unimaginable 20 years ago.
Obama's advisers assert that such a deal is possible because as far as they are concerned, the Shi'ite Iranians oppose Sunni jihadists just as much as the US does.
The Egyptian army put down riots by disgruntled police officers in 1986, and Mubarak threw an estimated 30, 000 people in jail when jihadists carried out a string of attacks on tourists.
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Fearful of a spillover of sectarian troubles from both Iraq and Lebanon into Syria, an officially secular country with an equally combustible sectarian mix, Syrian authorities have grown increasingly intolerant of jihadists.
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