The military leaders from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) gathered in Abidjan Thursday for an emergency meeting on Mali. The country was recently expelled from ECOWAS in response to a March 21 military coup deposing the democratically-elected president. Coup leaders said they were acting in a bid to repress an Tuareg rebellion in the north - the rebels now control roughly half of the country.

ECOWAS had asked that the military leaders convene to devise a plan of action for a contingent of 2,000 troops put on standby to potentially intervene in Mali.

The deputy defense minister of the Ivory Coast, Paul Koffi Koffi, said at the start of the meeting that the generals should decide how many soldiers each country would send.

"I invite you to prepare a plan of operational action of deployment of the standby forces of ECOWAS," Koffi said.

The West African group has already imposed a trade embargo on the landlocked country that is dependent on key imports like fuel, demanding that fresh democratic elections are held as soon as possible.

Appeals from all sides

The junior officer who led Mali's March coup, Captain Amadou Sanogo, again appealed for international aid on Thursday, saying his troops needed help against the northern rebels who now control roughly half of Mali, a region they refer to as "Azawad."

The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), meanwhile, issued a statement late on Wednesday saying they had achieved their goals in terms of securing territory and would stop military operations.

The MNLA also appealed for international military support against "all acts of aggression by Mali," calling out the UN Security Council, the US, France and regional neighbors by name in their online press release.

Former colonial power France pledged logistical support to ECOWAS, should the group decide to intervene. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said France was ready to help on a logistical level but that it would not send troops to Mali; he also confirmed that France had been in contact with the MNLA, a group he described as a "credible interlocutor."

"There will not be a military solution with the Tuaregs. There needs to be a political solution," Juppe said.

The MNLA has been fighting alongside Islamist militants seeking to impose sharia law on the northern region of Mali. This Ansar Dine group, Juppe said, had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) group that regularly threatens France.

"They have another objective which is to establish an Islamist regime in Mali and the Sahel as a whole," Juppe said. "I don't see how we could have dialog with AQIM whose objective is to kill our citizens."

The French foreign minister also said he though there was a clear distinction between Ansar Dine and the MNLA.

msh/pfd (AFP, AP, Reuters)