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244 CHAPTER 5Leadership remained in the hands of the Kel Adagh, but it was contested fromthe 1980s onwards, especially after the opening of the two new training campsin 1983. While leadership in the newly restructured movement and within thecamps rested in the hands of Lebanon veterans of Kel Adagh origins, a substantialnumber of the new recruits came from other clans form the Azawad or,to a smaller extent, from the Timbuktu area. These new recruits contested KelAdagh supremacy within the movement. They did so on the basis of the veryrevolutionary principles developed within the movement on social equality. Ifall are equal and the clans should be abolished, then why should leadershipremain in the hands of men from one particular tribal federation? Dissent andprivate initiatives abounded, due to the internal friction between the tribes. Distrustingthe aims of the Kel Adagh, Tanekra members from outside the Adaghorganised into separate groups and started to buy arms at the Libyan borderwith Chad and Niger, at the notorious arms market at the El Salvador Pass. 104The ongoing conflicts in Chad and Sudan and the high turnover of weaponryprovided the local arms markets with ample supply in Kalashnikovs and ammunition.There were problems, there were constraints. We, Iyad and the others, we wantedthe Kel Adagh Kel Tamasheq to do it all. When I speak of the Adagh, at the time,we had an idea. That is to say that we believed it to be a work for the Adagh people.This work did not even concern the other Kel Tamasheq, because it was us, it wasour job to revolt and we believed the other Kel Tamasheq would not agree with thatand that they thought it concerned them as well, that it concerned all. To us, it wasthe Kel Tamasheq of the Adagh who were most concerned. 105The Nigerien members of the movement also reorganised themselves on thebasis of their region of origin and common nationality in the Front Populairepour la Libération du Niger: FPLN. Because Camp Ithnân Mars and campRawd, which had been explicitly opened for the Nigeriens, had been taken overby the restructured Malian Tanekra, the FPLN was provided with a new campnear the city of Waw al-Kabir in 1984. In this camp, the Nigeriens formed themajority and thus the division between ‘Kel Mali’ and ‘Kel Niger’ was finallyestablished, the united Kel Nimagiler did no longer exist. 106 Internal frictionwas not limited to Malian and Nigerien nationals, or between members ofdifferent Malian tribes or social groups with a different status. Within the KelAdagh leadership of the Tanekra, friction and fighting occurred as well, onvarious levels. The most strenuous conflict was between the tribes of the Idnanand Ifoghas. In Kel Adagh historical narrative, the history of Idnan-Ifoghas104Interviews with Mohamed Lamine ag Mohamed Fall, Kidal 27/12/1998; and withBaye ag Alhassan, Ménaka 11/04/1999.105Interview with Mohamed Lamine ag Mohamed Fall. Kidal, 27/12/1998.106Interview with Alhadi Alhaji. Niger, 1995. Courtesy of Nadia Belalimat.