NAIROBI, Kenya -- Hundreds of French troops poured into central Mali on Friday in a bid to halt the advance of Islamist militants who last spring captured the country’s north and appeared this week poised to seize the remainder of the West African nation.

French aircraft reportedly bombed rebel positions near the town of Konna as troop transports arrived throughout the day to the south at the twin cities of Mopti and Sevare, where a major Malian military base is located.

"Some inhabitants from Konna told us that there are many dead bodies of jihadists hit by the air force," said Pate Thiam, a 33-year-old sales agent living in Sevare who sent his mother to a town further south for safety.

The dispatch of French troops, the first Western response to the growing presence of al Qaida-linked rebels in Mali, came only hours after the rebels had seized Konna, a strategically located central town, and appeared poised to move on the country’s capital, Bamako.

Alarmed by the sudden rebel advance, Malian President Dioncounda Traore sought assistance from France in a letter delivered to French President Francois Hollande on Thursday. French troops began arriving Thursday night, local residents told McClatchy.

"Yesterday, we were really scared," Thiam said. "My house is just opposite the military camp, and military vehicles and ambulances brought many wounded."

"The people panicked," said Fanta Kelly, a medical official in Mopti who said wounded civilians and soldiers overwhelmed that town’s hospital during the Islamists’ offensive.

The panic grew as word spread that Moussa Kusa, an insurgent preacher, had told followers that the Islamists planned to be in Sevare and Mopti by Friday prayers. "All the civil officials rushed to the fuel station with their vehicles to prepare to flee," Kelly said.

But the arrival of the French and the steady stream of aircraft flying in and out reassured local residents on Friday. "The situation seems better,” Kelly said.

"We pray that this will be the end of this unbearable situation," Thiam said.

Britain announced support for the French move, while the U.S. kept mostly mum on the topic, deferring to the French to discuss their involvement. Troops from Senegal and Nigeria also were taking part in the campaign, and the government of Mali declared a nationwide state of emergency. The U.N. Security Council late Thursday called for members to assist Mali.

In Paris, Hollande said that his country’s troops would stay in Mali “as long as necessary” to prevent the West African nation from becoming a new haven for al Qaida-linked extremists. It was not known, however, if the French intended merely to halt the Islamists’ advance or to launch an offensive to return Mali’s desert north to central government control. The area currently under Islamist rule is larger than France itself.

“Mali is facing an assault by terrorist elements coming from the north whose brutality and fanaticism is known across the world,” Hollande said, according to the Agence France Presse news service.

The seizure by militants of northern Mali last spring was an unintended consequence of the U.S.-backed NATO campaign to overthrow the government of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. Thousands of desert tribesmen known as Tuaregs, who’d been incorporated into Gadhafi’s army, fled Libya in the weeks after his fall, carrying their weapons with them. The Tuaregs resumed a military campaign to establish a Tuareg-ruled state in the Sahara Desert and quickly seized areas of northern Mali. Al Qaida-linked militants then displaced the secular Tuareg force.