Looks to me a bit like the UK Hawk jet trainer. They were/are more than occasionally sold to 3rd world nations as cheap multirole combat aircraft. You can fit bomb racks and/or rocket pods to them if you like. If the other side only has small arms, one of those things could still do an awful lot of damage. One rack of clusters could take out a couple of blocks of a town no problem.
wikipedia seems to confirm they can be used as combat aircraft
You can do a real nasty amount of harm with a pair of .50 cal and four bomb points.
However, what it was doing while int he air is kind of irrelevant. There's a no-fly order in place, it broke the order, it paid the price. By the sound of things the French were nice enough to let the aircrew get out of it before they blew it up.
Jon
