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A total of 26 people including four hunters lost their lives in an attack by a terrorist group on a village in the central region of Mali, near the border with Burkina Faso, a government official said yesterday.
The attackers attacked the villagers while most of them were working on their farmland in the village of Dembo, said Moulaye Guindo, the mayor of the town of Bankass, where Dembo is located.
In addition to the human victims, the villagers were also robbed of their animals. “On the same day, the terrorists also broke into the village of Sogou Droukoum and took away all the animals in the village,” said the Patriotic Movement for the Unity and Safeguarding of the Bankass Circle.
Other local sources say that the unidentified gunmen arrived on motorcycles and in all directions creating panic in the village.
Such attacks are increasingly common in central Mali as the country’s military junta also struggles to contain violence in the northern region.
No group claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack, but JNIM, an extremist group linked to al-Qaeda that has often targeted villagers in the area in similar ways, including in July when rebels attacked a wedding ceremony and killed at least 21 people, was quickly blamed.
Mali, like its neighbors Burkina Faso and Niger, has been battling an insurgency led by terrorist groups, some of which are allied with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. Following military coups in all three countries in recent years, the ruling juntas expelled French forces and turned to Russia for security assistance.
In December 2023, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali withdrew from the country at the request of the junta.
Armed violence in central and northern Mali has been raging for more than a decade. The security situation in the north of the country worsened further after military authorities ended the 2015 peace deal reached in Algiers, Algeria, with Azawad movements active in the north.