Mali Crisis- Lies about Al Qaida

I keep telling myself not to watch the BBC News at breakfast time because all the lies and propaganda of, what my friend Richard Wright calls, my "daily dose of bullshit", depress me badly. But my housemates insist on it and so I'm outvoted. But sometimes I'm glad I did watch it!

I've no link for this story because the BBC have not archived it, understandably! At about 8.30am this morning BBC News interviewed a man about the use of British soldiers in the Mali Crisis, see here for background: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21247399. This man, a military analyst of some kind whose name I neglected to note down (apologies), said that if the United Kingdom got involved in events in Mali it may well face being trapped in another Afghanistan. This ongoing war has resulted in the killing of over four hundred British troops (as well as an uncounted number of local people... but nobody mentions that!) when it was originally planned as a one-year operation with the expected casualty list in single or low double figures. This interviewee told the reporter that the UK Defence resources simply couldn't cope with fighting both wars and that the British public would not tolerate yet more coffins coming home to be paraded in the streets. Then he said something incredible! He told the reporter that the insurgents in northern Mali were not really "Al Qaida Islamists"; despite the fact that the media has always called them such. He said that they were actually secular Touareg nationalists. Touareg in this case doesn't refer to a German four-by-four car, but to a unique culture of people that live in the centre of the Sahara Desert. They are stateless and nomadic population and can be found in the inland regions of Algeria, Niger, Mali, a small part of Libya and several other countries. Their lifestyle is sophisticated and perfectly adapted to their harsh habitat and is built on millennia of experience and tradition. It's true that they are predominantly Islamic in faith, but they practice a different denomination to most other Muslims. In their culture women have far more rights and status than they do among most Arabs. Also their language is non-Semitic; it is not related to Arabic at all.

The man didn't go as far as to say that "Al Qaida" was a complete myth, but he did hint this very strongly. He specifically stated that the name was being used in this particular crisis for the purposes of deliberate misinformation. In the light of all this I have to ask how much else we've been told about the Mali Crisis is phoney? Did the "Al Qaida Islamists" really deface and destroy much of the cultural treasures of Timbuktu; see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21251444. Or was this a false flag operation by Malian and French government forces? If any HPANWO-readers saw this interview too, please let me know; especially if you recorded it!
(Edit 1/2/13) See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5IKm5X6n4c