Outside, on a field belonging to the state and guarded by rifle-toting youth, hundreds of young men sat or sprawled on reed mats. There are 4,000 of them, Mr. Diallo said, all of them just waiting to take on the Islamists, he insisted.

The odds seem almost insurmountable. The Islamists routed the Malian Army in earlier clashes, yet at the FLN camp, only 10 light machine guns were set up on the ground: the sum total of the group’s weaponry. Fatoumata Touré, 23, from Islamist-held Niafunké, near Timbuktu, grasped one of them uncertainly. She had never held a rifle before coming to the camp.

Still, she said she would “never” accept the presence of the Ansar Dine Islamist group that has gripped the region. “It is our country,” she said. “Their customs are not ours.”

Well off the main road, the militia training camps are hidden from view near this bustling river port city, a major shipment point for relief supplies to the famished populations of the Islamist-occupied north. It is the last population center still held by the government before the dividing line.

But Mopti, population about 100,000, is calm. There is little in this shady administrative capital on the confluence of the Niger and Bani rivers — once the gateway to a prime tourist destination, Mali’s cliffside Dogon country — to suggest the magnitude of the nation’s crisis.

The Islamists are barely 45 minutes away, but the market is crowded with women buying and selling vegetables. In Timbuktu, 180 miles up the road, the Islamists have forbidden women from going to market unaccompanied, or from walking alone in the street. But plenty of women crowd Mopti’s streets, and housewives and their daughters do their washing on the river’s broad bank every day.

Outside Mopti’s great mud-brick mosque, the muezzin, Sekou Badal Touré, launched into a diatribe against the monument-destroying jihadists up the road. Still, “everything is peaceful here,” he said. “Here, we are not attached to the occupied territories.”