The film was shot in Gao, northern Mali, on Feb 21st. It's basically the first combat footage to come out of the war in Mali – normally the French ban journalists from the front line and film a sanitised version of the fighting themselves for distribution to the media.
In this case, the insurgents came to us… they slipped into Gao overnight on small boats, used suicide bombers to blast their way into the principal government buildings and prepared for the day-long battle ahead.
The French left the fighting to the Malian army for most of the day, as a test of their combat ability – their ability to successfully fight the jihadists on their own is the French exit strategy. As the film shows – at very close quarters – the Malian army, while very brave, are almost completely untrained and had great difficulty fighting less than a dozen jihadists, some of whom were children. They fired wild bursts of automatic fire everywhere, destroyed the city centre, ran out of ammunition and had to wait for the french to turn up and save the day.