by Nurat Uthman
Tuareg separatists in northern Mali on Wednesday accused the army and Russian paramilitary group Wagner of having killed seven Chadian and Nigerien civilians in drone strikes on the Algerian border.
The Malian army did not respond to requests for comment from AFP about the allegations posed in a statement from the Permanent Strategic Framework (CSP), an alliance of predominantly Tuareg armed rebel groups.
Overnight Tuesday to Wednesday, “a Wagner-FAMA (Malian armed forces) terrorist coalition carried out drone strikes on a fuel sales outlet in Talhandak,” a crossroads village in the vast desert expanse of Mali’s far north close to the shared border with Algeria and Niger, the alliance said in its statement.
“This umpteenth attack on innocent people resulted in the deaths of seven people of Chadian and Nigerien nationality, as well as other victims who are still under the rubble.”
The CSP condemned “with the utmost rigor these repeated acts of terrorism by the Bamako junta, which targets only innocent people and civilian infrastructure.”
Fighting between the separatists and Mali government troops broke out in August after eight years of calm, as both sides scrambled to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of United Nations peacekeepers (MINUSMA), ordered to leave by the ruling junta in Bamako.
The military leaders who seized power in 2020 had achieved a symbolic success widely hailed in Mali, but the rebel groups in the northern desert region did not lay down their arms.
Malian forces were supported by Wagner mercenaries, according to the rebels and local officials, although the junta denies the presence of the private Russian security group in the country.
The offensive in northern Mali has been marked by numerous allegations of exactions against civilians by Malian forces and their Russian allies, which the Malian authorities systematically deny.
