Mali hit by new wave of coordinated rebel attacks

Jihadists and their separatist Tuareg allies hit Mali with fresh coordinated attacks Saturday, striking multiple towns and a prison just months after hobbling the country’s military junta with a similar wave of assaults.

The fighting, which started around 5:00 am (0500 GMT), comes after the Al-Qaeda-linked JNIM jihadists and Tuareg FLA separatists in late April captured the strategic northern town of Kidal and killed Mali’s defence minister.

On Saturday, they carried out their latest offensive in the northern towns of Gao, Anefis and Aguelhok, plus the central town of Sevare and at a prison in Kenieroba near the west African nation’s capital.

Since coups in 2020 and 2021, Mali has been led by the military, which promised to restore calm in the vast desert nation that has been grappling with a security crisis since 2012.

The Mali military, backed by Africa Corps, the Moscow-controlled paramilitary group, has intensified operations following the large-scale April 25-26 attacks.

The Tuareg FLA (Azawad Liberation Front) teamed up with JNIM (the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims) approximately a year ago, stepping up pressure on their joint nemesis, the country’s military leaders.

“All these operations, which are intermediate steps pending a more spectacular assault, contribute to weakening and isolating the regime”, Bakary Sambe, director of the Dakar-based Timbuktu Institute, told AFP.

Army ‘resistance’

The Malian army confirmed the rebel assaults on the four towns and Kenieroba on Facebook Saturday morning, asserting that “these attacks were vigorously repelled” and that “the situation is completely under control.”

However, sources consulted by AFP indicated that fighting was still ongoing midday.

FLA spokesman Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane told AFP that “several positions have fallen” in Anefis but that there was still fighting happening mid-Saturday morning.

An Anefis resident told AFP that “armed groups are in the town, but the army is still putting up resistance. The camp (there) has not yet fallen”.

The towns of Anefis and Aguelhok are the last remaining locations where Mali’s army maintains a presence in the northern Kidal region, following the April attacks.

In the northern town of Gao, a strategic town key to controlling the region, residents told AFP of gunfire and “loud blasts” heard near an army camp.

“For now, the objective appears to be seizing and securing the north before moving further south”, an associate at the Strategic Research Institute of the International Academy for the Fight Against Terrorism told AFP.

In the central town of Sevare, which houses a large army base and an airport, “explosions rang out... around 5:00 am, though their origin is not yet known. Shortly thereafter, several aircraft were spotted flying over the area”, a security source told AFP.

The Kenieroba prison complex, where jihadists and others are held, also came under attack some 70 kilometres (40 miles) southwest of Bamako.

“We are under our beds, the gunfire continues,” one prisoner told AFP, before communications seemed to be cut off.

The Kenieroba Central Detention Center is the largest modern penal facility in Mali, with a more than 2,500-prisoner capacity.

Coordinated attacks

Mali has been grappling with a security crisis since 2012 by jihadist groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group and community-based criminal groups and separatists.

In their joint assault in April, the Tuareg rebels and jihadists took Kidal, which had been taken in November 2023 by the Malian army and allied fighters from the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary force now replaced by Africa Corps.

Mali junta leader General Assimi Goita has aligned the country with Russia, turning its back on its former colonial power France.

The rebels plus the Malian army and its Russian allies have committed “grave abuses” against civilians since the April attacks, Human Rights Watch said in a report last month.

The April attacks were reminiscent of a 2012 crisis when Tuareg rebels allied with jihadists captured strategic hubs in the country’s vast, remote north.

A historically nomadic people, Tuaregs, who are spread across Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso, have waged an armed struggle for decades against marginalisation, with action centred in particular around Kidal.

Meanwhile, JNIM had since September been waging a series of attacks on fuel tanker convoys heading for Mali’s capital, which reached its peak last October.