Forty people, including nine soldiers, have been killed in a spate of attacks in central Mali, authorities said on Friday, with most of the deaths caused by interethnic violence in the deeply troubled region.
Thirty-one people were killed in an attack overnight in Ogossagou, a village mainly inhabited by Fulani people where 160 died in March last year in a massacre blamed on Dogon militiamen, the government said, raising the death toll.
About 30 gunmen carried out the new attack, village chief Aly Ousmane Barry said.
“Huts and crops were set alight, livestock was burned or taken away,” he said, vowing that the government would find the perpetrators.
A local government official, who requested anonymity, had earlier said that 28 people were missing.
He blamed the attack on a Dogon hunters’ group — an assertion that could be not be independently verified.
The official and Aly Ousmane Barry both said the attackers moved in several hours after government troops had pulled out of the area.
Later on Friday, eight Mali soldiers were killed and four others injured in an ambush in the central Gao region, the army said.
The Malian force also suffered “material damage,” the military said on social media sites, without indicating who had carried out the attack in the village of Bentia.
Also on Friday, a soldier was killed in an attack on a military camp in Mondoro, also in central Mali, security officials said.
The camp had already been hit before — as part of a joint raid by militants that also targeted the military camp of Boulkessy near the border with Burkina Faso, killing at least 25 soldiers.
Central Mali became gripped by ethnic violence after a jihadist revolt broke out in the north of the country in 2012.
The insurgency has claimed thousands of lives and spread to neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso.
Tit-for-tat attacks in central Mali flared after Fulani people, also called Peul, became associated with jihadists.
Led by a firebrand Islamic preacher, Amadou Koufa, a militia called the Katiba Macina recruited members from among the Fulani and has been accused of ethnically motivated attacks.
Other ethnic groups such as the Bambara or the Dogon began to form self-defense groups that have been accused of reprisal massacres.
In addition to the latest attack at Ogossagou, 14 Fulani were killed in central Mali last month.
About 75 Dogons were killed in the villages of Sobane Da, Gangafani and Yoro in June last year, in an attack blamed on Fulani militants.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS