Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have sustained heavy casualties in a new surge of fighting between government troops and rebels over the control of lucrative gold mines in the Central African Republic (CAR).
The clashes come amid increasing instability in the anarchic, resource-rich country, which in recent years has become one of Russia’s main hubs of influence in sub-Saharan Africa.
The government offensive is led by some of the estimated 1,000 Wagner fighters stationed in the country since 2018.
Photo: AFP
Wagner was founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman with close ties to the Kremlin, and has been deployed in about a dozen African countries as part of a Russian effort to project power on the continent and extract valuable resources.
The US last month designated Wagner a “significant transnational criminal organization,” in part because of its increasing role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Wagner fighters have defended the regime of CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadera against successive rebel attacks on the capital, Bangui, and have been accused of human rights abuses.
The clashes began two weeks ago in a town near the border with Cameroon and Chad, pitting rebels against the Russians and government troops. Violence flared again near the Sudanese border on the weekend. As many as 17 Wagner fighters were among the dozens of casualties, rebel sources said.
“We have lost two [who were killed] and many injured, but we defeated them and confiscated many military trucks. We staged an ambush and they fell into the trap,” said Ahmadou Ali, a senior leader in the rebel Coalition of Patriots for Change.
Experts have said that reliable figures are difficult to establish, but that it is clear Wagner sustained relatively heavy casualties.
A source close to CAR’s national military said seven Russians had been killed in the ambush, one of the heaviest single losses by Wagner in Africa since battles against Islamist rebels in Mozambique in 2019.
Ali said CAR’s forces had not joined the fighting.
“It was a battle between us and the Russians. They only used the government troops to legitimize things,” he said. “The Russians have taken all over the country. They are everywhere. They guard the borders and you see them everywhere there are [valuable] resources. They stole all our resources.”
Although Touadera’s grip on power remains strong, the new violence suggests greater instability in CAR than in recent years, analysts said.
The country, one of the poorest in the world, is facing economic collapse. A series of shifts in the alignment of regional powers in recent months have also raised tensions.
“The government in Bangui is totally running out of money,” International Crisis Group central Africa director Enrica Picco said.
“Wagner don’t fully control all the mining sites, and there is still fighting at several. The group’s move [into frontier zones] changed the conflict dynamics because the rebel factions there united in the face of the common enemy to protect their mining revenues,” she said.
Marie-Reine Hassen, a former diplomat and an opposition politician, said the president should relinquish power.
“He’s losing it and nobody wants him, I know he won’t do it, but the country is a mess. People are dying of hunger, no clean water, no electricity,” she said.
Last year there was another round of clashes after Wagner fighters attacked artisanal goldmines along the CAR border with Sudan. Dozens of miners were killed in at least three attacks, and witnesses described “massacres” by fighters they identified as being from Wagner, who swept through encampments full of migrant miners and mine workings during a six-week period.
Since Wagner arrived in CAR, it has tried to establish control over the flow of gold and diamonds as part of a broader push to secure resources.
Analysts have said the group was initially promised gold and other mining concessions for its services in place of cash payments.
The new clashes are a further example of how intervention by Wagner is often linked to an increase in civilian deaths, despite the group’s boasts that they fight insurgents more effectively than UN peacekeepers or conventional troops deployed by former colonial powers such as France.
A study by the non-governmental organization Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project found that civilians were targeted in more than half of the political violence involving Wagner in CAR, and 71 percent in Mali, where the mercenaries were deployed in late 2021 to reinforce a military-led regime as French troops withdrew.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
TOWERING FIGURE: To Republicans she was emblematic of the excesses of the liberal elite, but lawmakers admired her ability to corral her caucus through difficult votes Nancy Pelosi, a towering figure in US politics, a leading foe of US President Donald Trump and the first woman to serve as US House of Representatives speaker, on Thursday announced that she would step down at the next election. Admired as a master strategist with a no-nonsense leadership style that delivered for her party, the 85-year-old Democrat shepherded historic legislation through the US Congress as she navigated a bitter partisan divide. In later years, she was a fierce adversary of Trump, twice leading his impeachment and stunning Washington in 2020 when she ripped up a copy of his speech to the
RSS