“We’re encountering residual jihadist groups that are fighting,” said Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s defense minister.
On Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a military checkpoint in Gao, wounding a soldier, an act that provided further evidence of the continued threat of the militants.
The attack, from an insurgent reported to have ties to the militants who carried out the recent hostage-taking on the internationally managed gas field in eastern Algeria, could signal the opening of a campaign against French and African forces, a senior United States intelligence official said Friday.
“This is what they’re going to do — I.E.D.’s and small attacks,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, referring to improvised explosive devices, the homemade bombs that were the hallmark of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With France insisting that its presence in the country will be short-lived, more attention has been focused on the liabilities of the tattered Malian Army and troops deployed from neighboring countries.
On Friday, there were clashes between rival factions of the Malian Army in Bamako, with gunfire heard echoing from a barracks of paratroopers hostile to the element that supported a military coup in March.
About 2,000 troops from neighboring countries have arrived, eventually to replace French troops. A Western military official in Bamako said, “There is a difference between them operating in a theater under French control and one where the French have disengaged.”
Nor have the militants been completely flushed out of the towns that France has claimed to have liberated.
Amid concerns of violent score-settling, local officials in Gao have broadcast radio messages over the past 10 days asking for the citizens to report suspects to state authorities rather than take matters into their own hands. Community leaders, including local chiefs, youth groups and imams, have held meetings to discourage acts of vengeance.
In one episode on Jan. 26, a crowd encircled an already bloodied militant whose comrades had recently abandoned Gao, recalled Dani Sidi Touré, a resident who was one of those intent on revenge.
“He said, ‘Please, for Allah’s sake, do not kill me,’ ” Mr. Touré said. “And then I took my screwdriver and stabbed him in the neck.”
Others joined in the attack. “When I tried to pull the screwdriver out, the handle came off but the metal stayed inside him,” he continued. “A man with a big knife came over and chopped him on his head. He fell to the ground, and others came with pieces of wood and big stones and started beating him.”
American officials monitoring the situation from afar said that the extremists who once controlled much of northern Mali would be difficult to eliminate from the region entirely.
“Realistically, probably the best you can get is containment and disruption so that Al Qaeda is no longer able to control territory,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, said in a speech in Washington last month.
The authorities are investigating numerous other suspected militants as local citizens’ patrols circulate in search of the extremists and their allies, which at one time included the Tuaregs.
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