Mohamed Ag Najem (1959-) was head of the military operations of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) from 15 October 2011.
Biography[]
Mohamed Ag Najem was born around 1959 in the Adrar des Ifoghas massif of Mali to a family of Sunni Muslim Tuaregs, and in 1963 his father was killed in the First Tuareg Rebellion against the government. When he was 20, he served in the Libyan Army under Muammar Gaddafi and served in Libya and in the Libyan-Chadian War in the 1980s. Ag Najem became a colonel in the Libyan Army, but he returned home when the Libyan Civil War began. He federated fellow Libyan soldiers, local Tuareg clans, and Tuareg deserters from the Malian Army into the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad to fight for the Tuaregs' independence, but in the summer of 2012 the independent state of Azawad was taken over by Islamists.