French troops took control overnight of the airport at the last major northern Mali town still in rebel hands, officials said on Wednesday, after Islamist militants abandoned two other principal settlements in the vast, desert region where residents' relief and elation has given way to some measure of reprisal and frustration. A French military spokesman in Paris, Col. Thierry Burkhard, said French troops reached the airport at Kidal, in the remote northeast of Mali, in an ongoing operation that is ongoing. So French forces, with the help of the Malian Army, have reestablished control in all three places, Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, without meeting much resistance.