Don’t release the pressure. The Malian army announced on Saturday evening that it had eliminated “a dozen terrorists”, including a Franco-Tunisian jihadist “executive” during two airstrikes carried out on Thursday in central Mali. The FAMa (Malian Armed Forces) “come by two air strike operations on April 14, 2022 to neutralize a dozen terrorists in the forest of Ganguel about 10 km” from the locality of Moura, indicates a press release from the staff. general.
“These strikes made it possible to neutralize some executives of the GSIM” (Support Group for Islam and Muslims), the main jihadist alliance in the Sahel, linked to Al-Qaeda and led by the Malian Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghaly, “including Samir Al-Bourhan, a Franco-Tunisian terrorist cadre, speaking French and Arabic”, adds the text.
The army says it acted “on the basis of very precise technical information indicating a group of terrorists”, who, according to it, came “to boost the morale of the fighters” of the GSIM and to “provide them with the long-awaited financial and logistical support”. after their “stinging setback of Moura”.
Accusations d’exactions
The Malian army says it “neutralized” 203 jihadists in Moura at the end of March, where the American human rights NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) accuses it of having summarily executed 300 civilians with the help from foreign fighters.
No photo or video to accredit the version of the Malian authorities or that of HRW has emerged from Moura since then. The United Nations mission in Mali (Minusma) has been asking Bamako for several days in vain to allow it to send a team of investigators to the area.
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Governed since 2020 by soldiers who came to power by force, Mali has been plunged into a deep security crisis since 2012 that the deployment of foreign forces has failed to resolve. Starting in the north of the country, the jihadist violence spread towards the center and the south before the conflict became complicated with the appearance of community militias and criminal gangs.
The conflict has killed thousands of civilians and combatants and central Mali is currently one of the main centers of the Sahelian crisis.