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Forty-two Malian soldiers were killed on Sunday in the northeast of mali, near the borders of Burkina Faso and Niger, in the deadliest attack attributed to jihadists against Malian forces since 2019, according to a new report. This new count comes from an official document listing the deceased soldiers by name, authenticated on Wednesday August 10 by several senior military officials at AFP. The previous one indicated 17 soldiers and 4 civilians killed.
This is the heaviest official toll for the Malian army since the series of attacks at the end of 2019-early 2020 by the Islamic State group of military camps in this same region known as the three borders.
The attack on Sunday comes as Mali, which pushed the old French ally out and ardently relaunched cooperation with Moscow, has for some weeks been facing a resurgence of attacks from the nebula of the Support Group for Islam. and Muslims (GSIM, JNIM in Arabic).
Among the four civilians killed, some of them were local elected officials, relatives of the victims told AFP on condition of anonymity. The statement also claimed that seven “enemies” had died in the attack, assailants “probably from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (EIGS) and benefiting from drone and artillery support with the use of explosives and booby-trapped vehicles”.
three borders
The Tessit area, located on the Malian side of the three-border zone, in a huge rural region not controlled by the state, is frequently the scene of clashes and attacks.
Armed groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda, gathered under the leadership of GSIM, have been fighting there since 2020 the group EIGS, affiliated with the Islamic State organization (IS). The jihadists seek to take control of this strategic and gold-bearing area.
The Malian army, based in a military camp near the town of Tessit, has also often been attacked in this region. In March 2021, thirty-three Tessit relief soldiers were killed in an ambush claimed by EIGS.
In this area sometimes called the “Malian Gourma” also operate blue helmets from the UN mission in Mali.
As for civilians, as elsewhere in Mali, they are caught in the crossfire of these actors in the conflict, and accused of being allies with one or the other. In February, around forty of them were killed by the EIGS in Tessit, accused of complicity with Al-Qaeda.
The inhabitants of the area, regularly cut off from the telephone network for several years and all the more landlocked in the rainy season (July to September), have fled by the thousands, in particular to the large neighboring town of Gao, some 150 km to the north. .
wave of attacks
This area of the three borders had been the scene at the end of 2019-beginning of 2020 of the deadliest series of attacks that the three countries concerned had known since the outbreak of the conflict in 2012 in northern Mali.
More than a dozen isolated camps in which the Sahelian soldiers were entrenched had been the targets of the EIGS according to a proven modus operandi: the lightning attack of fighters on motorcycles. Hundreds of soldiers had been killed. These setbacks had prompted the Malian army, as well as the Nigerien and Burkinabe soldiers, to withdraw and regroup in stronger places.
A military burst was announced in January 2020 during a Franco-Sahelian summit in Pau (southwest of France). The EIGS had been designated “enemy number one” and many operations, French and Sahelian, had been carried out on the three borders.
Many leaders of the jihadist group were killed in 2020 and 2021, chief among them its founder, Abu Walid Al-Sahraoui, in August 2021. But, say several residents and experts, the group has never stopped recruit and operate.
At the end of July, at least eleven coordinated attacks bearing the mark of the GSIM hit Malian territory. One of them took place in Kati, at the gates of Bamako and at the heart of the Malian military apparatus.