NARRATIVE – Last weekend, armed Islamists killed more than 130 civilians near Bankass in the center of the country without the army intervening.
Stupor, fear, mourning and then anger. In Mali, the scale of feelings is the same after each of the massacres that hit the country. On Tuesday, in Bankass, in this center which has become a zone of combat between the army and the jihadists, dozens of people demonstrated to demand state protection and an end to the spiral of violence.
Last weekend, several villages were the scene of one of the worst carnage that Mali has known, yet not stingy with killings. The balance sheet, still uncertain, lists 132 dead but some local dignitaries fear 180 victims, all civilians. According to witnesses, armed Islamists arrived on Saturday around 4 p.m. near Diamweli, Dessagou and especially Diallassougou. On the local radios, the survivors say that a hundred of these men, on their usual motorcycles, surrounded the large town. “They told people: you are not Muslims, so they took the men away, a hundred people left…
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