The U.N. Security Council on Friday unanimously approved a plan to back an African-led military force to help the Malian army oust Islamic militants who seized the northern half of the country and are turning it into an al-Qaida terrorist hub.

The French-sponsored resolution expresses alarm over the infiltration by "al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), affiliated groups and other extremist groups," and condemns "the abuses of human rights committed in the north of Mali by armed rebels, terrorist and other extremist groups."

The U.N. Security Council is poised to adopt a draft resolution paving the way for military intervention in Mali Friday, French officials said.

The resolution seeks a detailed plan within 30 days from West Africa's ECOWAS regional body, the African Union and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on an international military intervention in Mali in a bid to oust militants from the country's north.

Several thousand people marched Thursday in Mali's capital Bamako to call for armed intervention by a west African force to help wrest back the vast north from armed Islamist groups.

The demonstrators carried banners and placards expressing support for the Malian army, Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is preparing to send troops if it gets the backing of the United Nations and western countries.

The United States will support France if it intervenes militarily in its former colony Mali, where Islamist forces control the north of the country, a top U.S. diplomat said in an interview Tuesday.

"We back France and if it decides to intervene militarily, it can count on the support of the United States," Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Gordon told Le Monde newspaper.

France will provide logistical, political and material support for U.N.-backed African military intervention in Mali, President Francois Hollande promised on Tuesday.

France is pushing for a U.N. Security Council resolution which will authorize west African countries to establish a force capable of reclaiming control of northern Mali from Islamic radicals.

Mauritania and Algeria have called for dialogue in a bid to reach a political solution to the six-month-old crisis in neighboring Mali, after ruling out sending troops there to battle Islamist militia.

"Both countries agree on the importance of dialogue for the emergence of political solutions to the crisis in Mali," Abdelkader Messahel, Algeria's minister for Maghreb and African affairs, said in Nouakchott late Sunday.

Armed Islamists in northern Mali attacked a vehicle and killed two civilians overnight, a witness and local official said Friday.

"There were nine of us in the vehicle between Timbuktu and Douentza. The Islamists ordered us to stop, the driver slowed but they opened fire nonetheless and two people in the front were killed," a survivor told Agence France Presse.

The United States would support a "well planned" and "well resourced" African-led force to help oust Islamic rebels in northern Mali, provided its neighbors back the idea, a U.S. official said Monday.

"Yes, I say there will have to be at some point military action to push" the rebels linked to Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb out of northern Mali, the top U.S. diplomat for Africa, Johnnie Carson, said.

Islamists destroyed Saturday another tomb of a Muslim saint in a northern Mali region under their control, witnesses said.

"I saw the Islamists in Goundam destroy the mausoleum of Alfa Mobo, beside the cemetery," local municipal councilor Mamadou Cisse told Agence France Presse.

French President Francois Hollande on Wednesday called for the U.N. Security Council to meet urgently to approve Mali's call for an African-led force to help flush out armed Islamist rebels.

"It has come time for the international community to come to the assistance of Mali. The time has come," he told a high-level meeting on the mounting humanitarian crisis in the west African region of the Sahel.