simultaneous attacks against three army camps, no report yet

A “terrorist attack” targeted Sunday morning three army camps in central Mali, we learned from military sources who did not specify the results of these attacks.

These attacks targeted from 05:00 (GMT and local) the camps of Sévaré, Nionio and Bopho, three localities in central Mali, said the same sources.

In Sévaré, “there was a double terrorist attack, with explosion of devices and shooting”, indicated one of these sources, without further details.

“The army retaliated. We cannot at the moment give (a) balance sheet,” she said.

“We have asked Minusma (the UN Mission in Mali), as part of our collaboration, to send a rapid intervention force near the Sévaré camp to help secure it,” added the same military source, confirmed by a military source within the Minusma.

Plunged since 2012 into a deep security crisis that the deployment of foreign forces has not been able to resolve, Mali has experienced two military coups since August 2020.

Starting in the north of the country, the jihadist violence spread towards the center and the south before the conflict became more complicated with the appearance of community militias and criminal gangs.

The conflict has killed thousands of civilians and combatants and central Mali is currently one of the main centers of the Sahelian crisis.

The military in power since 2020 have moved closer to Moscow at the same time as they turned away from France, engaged militarily in the country once morest the jihadists since 2013.

Mali has thus massively appealed to what it presents as “instructors” from Russia, while Westerners (Paris and Washington in particular) denounce the presence in the country of “mercenaries” from the private Russian group Wagner, which denies firmly the Malian colonels.

Against the backdrop of a diplomatic crisis with the junta, Paris announced in February the withdrawal of its soldiers deployed in Mali, an operation to be completed this summer.