A French soldier checks the passengers of a truck arriving in Gao in February 2013. AP
Northern Mali is once again the scene of major violence. At least twenty civilians were killed by gunmen near Gao on Sunday June 19, and a UN peacekeeper died in the north of the Sahel, where the security situation is deteriorating.
“Criminal terrorists assassinated a local police officer on condition of anonymity in several hamlets of the city of Anchavaj, a few tens of kilometers north of Gao, on Saturday.
Another police officer in Bamako, also on condition of anonymity, confirmed to AFP “the killing of about twenty civilians on Saturday in Ebak, 35 kilometers north of Gao, and in neighboring towns,” referring to “one committed by armed criminals.” Did”. “Jihadists murdered twenty-four civilians in Anchawaj municipality on Saturday. There is general panic,” a local authority told AFP.
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Increasingly frequent jihadist attacks
However, none of the other sources claimed that jihadists were the perpetrators of the attacks. In this vast Sahel region, jihadists belonging to the grouping Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (EIGS) are increasingly attacking and expanding their reach.
The scant information from this remote and inaccessible area tells of hundreds of civilians killed and thousands displaced in recent months in the Ménaka regions near the Niger and Gao borders further west.
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On Wednesday, the Movement for the Salvation of Azawad (MSA), one of the groups fighting the jihadists, asserted that 22 people had been killed by “armed men” in the village of Izingaz, in the Menaka region. No other source has confirmed or denied the information.
According to the UN, the security situation has “severely deteriorated”.
The elected representative of the Gao region also described on Sunday “a very worrying situation in the city of Anchavaj” with many civilians fleeing the abuses “of the jihadists” in neighboring villages. “A large part of the Gao region and that of Ménaka” are “occupied by jihadists,” he continued. “The state has to do something. »
This region has been the scene of violence since the conflict began in 2012, when armed rebel groups rose up against Bamako. In 2015 they signed a peace agreement with Mali, implementation of which is still difficult.
In addition to these armed groups, jihadist movements linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State organization operate in the region, fighting against the symbols of the state, against those they accuse of supporting it, and between them for control of territories . Human traffickers and other bandits are also present in this desert region where the state is almost non-existent.
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The security situation in the Gao and Ménaka regions has recently “deteriorated sharply,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in his most recent report. The “terrorist threat persists [s’y] expanding,” he lamented, expressing concern at “the lack of a sustained presence of security forces and public administration in these areas”.
A blue helmet killed in Kidal, the 175th since 2013
Malian soldiers, blue helmets from the UN mission in Mali (Minusma, 13,000 soldiers) and French soldiers from Operation Barkhane are stationed in Gao. The latter, who began a phased withdrawal from Mali earlier this year, will have to leave Gao base, the last enclave where they remain in Mali, “at the end of the summer,” according to the state – French major.
On Sunday morning, a mine explosion killed a Guinean peacekeeper in Kidal, further north, while he was taking part in a security patrol in a mine detection and detection operation, according to Minusma. This new death comes in a tense context of negotiations for the renewal of the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission, which has suffered the most human casualties. Since its inception in 2013, 175 of its blue helmets have died in hostile acts.
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Mali, a poor, landlocked country in the heart of the Sahel, was the scene of two military coups in August 2020 and May 2021. The political crisis comes hand-in-hand with a severe security crisis that has been ongoing since 2012 and the outbreak of separatist and jihadist insurgencies in the north.