Malian Islamist group Ansar Dine has said it is prepared to distance itself from al-Qaida's North Africa branch, a newspaper said on Saturday, a day after sending a delegation to Algiers for peace talks.

Ansar Dine's leader Iyad Ag Ghaly "would be ready to officially distance himself from AQIM (al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) and play the 'democracy' game," El-Watan reported, citing an Algerian official.

One of the radical Islamist groups controlling northern Mali, Ansar Dine, on Friday sent delegations to Algeria and Burkina Faso to hold peace talks, a source close to the extremists said.

"Currently we have a delegation on its way to Ouagadougou and a second on its way to Algiers," an aide to Ansar Dine leader Iyad Ag Ghaly told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Algeria on Monday, with the political crisis in neighboring Mali a central focus of her scheduled talks with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Clinton's plane touched down shortly before 0530 GMT at Algiers international airport at the start of her second visit to the Algerian capital following a trip last year.

France's defense minister has backtracked from a suggestion that military intervention in Mali is imminent, cautioning that preparations to deploy 3,000 African troops remain at an early stage.

Jean-Yves Le Drian last week said military action aimed at removing Islamist groups who have taken control of northern Mali would happen in "weeks not months."

African and European leaders will meet in Bamako on Friday to work on the logistics of reconquering Mali's desert north from armed Islamists.

The summit comes a week after the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution giving West African nations 45 days to lay out details for a military intervention.

Islamists controlling northern Mali were destroying more Muslim saints' tombs in the ancient city of Timbuktu on Thursday, witnesses said, in the latest attack on the world heritage sites considered blasphemous by the jihadists.

Rebels from the al-Qaida-allied group Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith) have drawn international condemnation for waging a campaign of destruction on the city's cultural treasures since seizing it in the wake of a March coup that plunged Mali into chaos.

Some 2,000 people took to the streets in the Malian capital Thursday to protest plans for a foreign military intervention to reclaim territory seized by armed Islamist groups in the north.

The march was organized to support Mali's own army and to protest plans by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to send in a regional force, but failed to match the numbers of a pro-intervention march a week ago, which drew some 10,000 people.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb's supremo has appointed a new deputy and relieved Mokhtar Belmokhtar, one of two top commanders in northern Mali, security sources said.

"Abdelmalek Droukdel has appointed Yahya Abou El Hamame as 'emir of the Sahel' to replace Nabil" Makhloufi, a Malian security official told AFP on condition of anonymity late Sunday.

Europe's foreign ministers will sharply ramp up the pressure on Iran and Syria at talks Monday, while taking a "big step" in Africa by agreeing to assist Mali reconquer its north from rebels and Islamist extremists.

Meeting days before a European Union summit, the bloc's 27 foreign ministers are tipped to agree what a diplomatic source dubbed "one of the toughest packages of sanctions" yet against Tehran over its disputed nuclear program.

The incoming head of the African Union Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, said on Saturday she supported military intervention in Mali as long as it did not worsen insecurity there.

"If there is a need for it ... as long as it's done in a way that does not cause, create more problems than there are," she said when asked if she approved sending troops in to confront al-Qaida-linked Islamist militants controlling northern Mali.