BAMAKO: Two attacks in central Mali claimed by Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists have killed more than 30 people, local, security and administrative sources told AFP on Thursday.
The two strikes come less than a fortnight after a large-scale, coordinated offensive by jihadists and separatists on junta positions, which plunged the west African country into a fresh security crisis.
“At least 35 people were killed on Wednesday in near simultaneous attacks” on the villages of Korikori and Gomossogou, a youth official said.
A security and an administrative source both reported more than 30 dead in the assaults, claimed by the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM).
WAMAPS, a group of west African journalists specialising in Sahel security, said the provisional toll was more than 50 villagers killed and several still missing.
“Villages have been looted and some properties set on fire,” the group added.
The Malian army said on Thursday it had carried out “a targeted operation against terrorist armed groups” in the area and around a dozen fighters were “neutralised”.
It did not give further details.
The devastating assaults on April 25 and 26 by the JNIM and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), an ethnic Tuareg separatist movement, targeted strategic towns including Kidal in the desert north, and Kati, a garrison town near the capital Bamako.
Defence Minister Sadio Camara, the 47-year-old architect of Mali’s military alliance with Russia, was killed by a car bomb at his residence.
Kidal and other towns and villages in the north were captured and are now under the control of the FLA and the jihadists, who have since imposed a blockade on Bamako.
On Wednesday, security, legal and family sources told AFP that several opposition figures and military personnel had been detained or abducted following the attacks.
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