Attackers attacked a patrol of German soldiers from the UN force Minusma in Mali, West Africa. According to official information, the attack took place on Friday about 155 kilometers north of Gao, where Bundeswehr soldiers are stationed at Camp Castor.
The UN mission Minusma confirmed an attack with a car bomb and spoke of 15 injured, but without naming their nationality. As the Bundeswehr operations command on Twitter announced that the attack was a suicide attack. The mirror reported meanwhile, citing internal reports that almost a dozen German soldiers were injured, three of them apparently seriously. “The most seriously wounded are currently being flown to Germany via neighboring Niger,” the report said. A spokesman for the operational command in Potsdam confirmed that “German forces” were affected.
FDP defense politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann referred via Twitter to the first reports about the attack and seriously wounded Bundeswehr soldiers. “It is too early for further speculation. My thoughts are now exclusively with the soldiers, relatives and helpers,” she wrote.
In Mali, the federal government is essentially concerned with stopping the advance of Islamists in the Sahel region alongside France. With up to 600 soldiers, the Bundeswehr takes part in the EU training mission EUTM and with up to 1,100 soldiers in the UN mission Minusma. The majority of the Bundeswehr soldiers are stationed at Camp Castor. French President Emmanuel Macron now wants to bring a number of soldiers home. Less than a year before the presidential election, an international mission is set to replace the French operation.
Macron said many soldiers had died; the use is increasingly unpopular in France less than a year before the presidential election. But the strategy was also increasingly in question politically: France, like the USA, recently discontinued its cooperation with the army in Mali, after the latter had put in a coup for the second time in nine months at the end of May and overturned the civilian interim government.
After the new military coup in Mali, support for the Bundeswehr’s deployment there is also dwindling in Germany. “If the officers trained by Germany, among others, become putschists in Mali and are ready to work with Islamists, our training mission as part of the fight against terrorism will become a farce,” said Norbert Röttgen, CDU foreign policy expert, at the end of May Süddeutsche Zeitung. This would then have “completely lost its legitimacy”. About a month ago, the military had put into the West African country for the second time in nine months and the leadership was established. Just before that, the Bundestag had extended the mandates for the Bundeswehr to participate in two missions in Mali.