The Tuareg separatists announced on Wednesday December 20 that they had established a blockade on the main roads in the north of the country of Mali, where the army has regained a foothold in recent weeks.
The Permanent Strategic Framework (CSP), an alliance of armed rebel groups, declared in a press release that it had decided “to establish a total blockade on the axes going from the Algerian border to the towns of Ménaka, Kidal, Gao, Timbuktu and Taoudenni”, the main localities in the north, which extend over a vast area between Mauritania, Mali and Niger. This blockade “concerns all products and all types of means of transport,” the alliance clarified in this press release.
Predominantly Tuareg rebel groups have lost control of several localities in recent weeks, pushed back by an offensive by the Malian army which culminated in mid-November with the capture of Kidal, a bastion of independence demands and a major sovereignty issue for the country. central state.
Hostilities resumed in August after eight years of calm between the belligerents, who are vying for control of the territory and military camps left by the blue helmets of the UN Mission pushed out by Bamako.
The colonels who took power by force in 2020 thus achieved a widely hailed symbolic success in Mali, but the rebels did not lay down their arms and dispersed in this desert and mountainous region. “The fight continues,” declared the CSP following the capture of Kidal, from which the alliance claimed to have withdrawn “for strategic reasons.”
“A cowardly act.”
The Malian army’s air assets, planes and drones, allowed it to take the initiative against the rebels, who do not have such equipment. The Malian forces were also supported by Wagner mercenaries, according to the rebels and local elected officials, although the junta denies the presence in the country of the Russian private security group with its criticized practices.
The offensive in northern Mali has been marked by numerous allegations of abuses against civilians by Malian forces and their Russian allies, which the Malian authorities systematically deny.
The collection and verification of information is complicated in a large part of Mali due to the difficulty of accessing remote sites and independent sources in a context of high insecurity and the muzzling of dissident voices.
The Malian army also says it “learned with indignation of the kidnapping of certain [of its] elements” during an attack last week in the town of Farabougou (center), in a press release Wednesday evening. She denounces “a cowardly act” committed to “demoralize” the soldiers and reassures that “everything will be done to allow the hostages to regain their freedom”, in this press release which does not identify the soldiers in captivity and does not give their number.
Two people in military uniform claim, respectively in French and in the local Bambara language, in two separate videos authenticated Wednesday by AFP, to be Malian soldiers taken hostage by the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM, JNIM following the Arabic acronym), affiliated with Al-Qaeda, following the attack on the Farabougou camp. They call on the Malian authorities to work for their release.
The army was content to report, on December 14, a “terrorist” attack which it repelled on December 12 against this camp, without any human toll. Local sources told AFP that dozens of Malian soldiers and civilians had been killed.
