It was only a few hours after the French warnings. The Malian army said on Friday evening it had discovered a mass grave near the Gossi base in the north of the country, which was returned by the French army four days ago. Earlier, the French General Staff had released a video which it believed showed Wagner’s Russian mercenaries burying bodies to accuse the French of leaving a mass grave.
“Body in an advanced state of decay were discovered in a mass grave not far from the camp formerly occupied by the French Barkhane troops,” the General Staff of the Malian Army confirmed in a press release. On Tuesday, the French general staff warned of “information attacks” aimed at discrediting the French army when the Gossi base was handed over.
Video filmed by drone
In this video, captured by a drone accessed by AFP Thursday night (and shared on Twitter), which the French general staff dubbed an “information attack,” soldiers can be seen scampering around corpses, which they cover with sand. In another sequence, we see two of these soldiers filming the half-buried bodies.
Staff assures they are white soldiers, identified from videos and photos taken elsewhere. Some photos also show vehicles exiting a base whose structure and surroundings match Gossi’s hold, which an AFP team has already visited twice.
“Structured information manoeuvre”
At the beginning of this informational response, images were broadcast on a Twitter account on Thursday called Dia Diarra, who describes himself as a “former soldier” and “Malian patriot”. This account was created in January 2022, found AFP. After warning on Wednesday about the imminent release of a video showing abuse committed by the French, the next day he posted a photo of blurred bodies buried in the sand with the comment: “This is what the French left behind when they left the base at #Gossi (…) we can’t hide it! “. The same account later posts a short video of these half-buried bodies.
“We are witnessing a structured information maneuver” based on the “upscaling of a first tweet,” commented staff spokesman Colonel Pascal Ianni on Friday.
Dia Diarra’s account “is most likely a fake account created by Wagner,” the Russian private military company, the French staffer estimates. “This maneuver to discredit the force (French anti-jihadist in the Sahel) Barkhane seems to be coordinated. It is representative of the numerous information attacks that the French military has been subjected to for many months.”
According to the French Army, “the comparison of the photos published on Twitter with the images collected by the specialized sensor allows a direct link between what Wagner’s mercenaries are doing and what is falsely attributed to the French soldiers”.
According to her, “these demands testify to the behavior of Wagner’s mercenaries, who have been observed and denounced by many international organizations and NGOs since (his) deployment in the Central African Republic”.