Armed groups signatories to an important peace agreement in northern Mali declared on Sunday September 10 that they were preparing to defend themselves militarily against the junta in power in Bamako, raising fears of a resumption of open hostilities. The Permanent Strategic Framework (CSP), which brings together these groups, called in a press release for civilians to move away from installations and places of military activity.
Still in the north, the governorate of the Gao region, where attacks and clashes have increased in recent weeks, has established a thirty-day night curfew, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., until October 9 inclusive. Only security force vehicles are exempt, says the text consulted by AFP.
These developments come in a context of growing tensions in this region of Mali where a multitude of armed actors operate vying for control of the territory: national army, predominantly Tuareg groups, jihadist groups, not to mention bandits. These tensions make us fear more than ever the reopening of the front between the Malian army and the predominantly Tuareg groups who fought the central state from 2012, before accepting a ceasefire in 2014 and signing the the Algiers peace agreement in 2015.
The jihadists, who had first fought the Malian forces with the Tuareg and Arab rebels before turning against them, are not concerned by the Algiers agreement and have since extended their actions to the center of the country, but also to the Burkina Faso and Niger, under the banner of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS) organization.
The Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), which is part of the CSP, claimed on Saturday evening to have shot down a Malian army plane after a bombing on its positions in the Gao region. The knocking out of combat of a Malian army plane by armed groups in the north would be an unprecedented act in recent years. The Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Alou Boi Diarra, assured state television on Sunday evening that the aircraft, on an unspecified mission, had experienced “some technical problems which forced the crew to abandon the edge, that is to say to eject from the aircraft, which crashed”. The crew “was recovered safe and sound,” he said.
Jihadist attacks
The regions of Gao and Timbuktu have been the scene for several weeks of a succession of jihadist attacks, but also of skirmishes involving the Malian army and the groups signatory to the Algiers agreement. A double attack blamed on jihadists killed 64 civilians and soldiers between Timbuktu and Gao on Thursday, according to a government report. But different sources indicate that the human losses are in fact much heavier.
These events coincide with the ongoing disengagement of Minusma, the UN mission deployed in Mali since 2013 and pushed out by the junta in 2023.
The CSP accused the junta, in a press release on Sunday, of a series of violations of the 2014 ceasefire and the 2015 peace agreement. It attributes to the junta in power since 2020 a strategy of breaking the cease fire. He “declares to henceforth adopt all measures of self-defense against the forces of this junta throughout the entire territory of Azawad” (northern Mali, the subject of ancient Tuareg independence demands). The junta “pretexts the decision to withdraw the UN mission” to reoccupy areas whose control should return to armed groups under the arrangements of 2014 and 2015, accuses the CSP.
The junta has made the restoration of sovereignty one of its mantras, an objective that clashes with the various armed groups, which control large areas of territory. The handover of the Ber camp by Minusma to the army in mid-August gave rise to fighting between soldiers and jihadists, but also to clashes between the army and the CMA. The CSP assures that the transfer and capture of the locality of Ber by the Malian army and the men of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner were accompanied by a “lot of violations, ransackings, arbitrary arrests, summary executions perpetrated against civilians.”
After initially pushing the French anti-jihadist force “Barkhane”, the ruling junta in Bamako is seen by many to have secured Wagner’s services, despite his denials.