The Malian army announced Saturday night that it had eliminated “a dozen terrorists,” including a Franco-Tunisian jihadist “senior man,” in two airstrikes carried out in central Mali on Thursday. The FAMa (Malian Armed Forces) “arrived on April 14, 2022 through two airstrikes to neutralize a dozen terrorists in the Ganguel forest about 10 km” from the village of Moura, according to a General Staff press release.
“These strikes made it possible to neutralize some leaders of the GSIM” (Support Group for Islam and Muslims), the main jihadist alliance in the Sahel, linked to al-Qaeda and led by Malian Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghaly , including Samir Al-Bourhan, a Franco-Tunisian terrorist cadre who speaks French and Arabic,” adds the text. The army says it “acted on the basis of very precise technical information and reported a group of terrorists” who, it is said to have come “to boost the morale of the GSIM fighters” and to give them “the long-awaited “financial and logistical support” after their “stabbing setback from Moura”.
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According to the Malian army, it “neutralized” 203 jihadists in Moura at the end of March, where the American human rights NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) accuses them of having executed 300 civilians with the help of foreign fighters. Since then, no photo or video has emerged from Moura to accredit the Malian authorities’ or HRW’s version. The United Nations Mission in Mali (Minusma) has been asking Bamako to send a team of investigators to the area for days without success.
Ruled by soldiers who seized power by force since 2020, Mali has been plunged into a deep security crisis since 2012, which the deployment of foreign armed forces could not solve. Starting in the north of the country, jihadist violence spread towards the center and south before the conflict was further complicated by the emergence of vigilante groups and criminal gangs.
The conflict has killed thousands of civilians and combatants, and central Mali is currently one of the main centers of the crisis in the Sahel.