Mali: Three UN Peacekeepers Wounded In Northern Mali Attack
Base housing Malian, French and UN troops in Tessalit was targeted, says the UN peacekeeping mission in the country.
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Three United Nations peacekeepers have been seriously wounded in a rocket attack on military base in northern Mali, UN and the local officials said. Olivier Salgado, the spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission in the the West African country, MINUSMA, said Sunday’s attack took place on a base in Tessalit, which houses Malian soldiers, UN peacekeepers and French troops. Three 3
peacekeepers were gravely wounded in the attack, also added. A Tessalit tribal leader, who also declined to be named, said the camp had come under rocket fire. The situation is is currently calm and under control, he said. Mali has been battling a brutal uprising since the 2012, when the rebel fighters first emerged during a rebellion by ethnic Tuareg separatists in the north. The France
also intervened to crush the rebellion, but the fighters scattered and regrouped and taking their campaign into central Mali in 2015 and then into neighbouring Niger and Burkina Faso. First established in 2013, the 13,000 strong MINUSMA has suffered one of the highest death tolls of any mission in UN peacekeeping history. More than 130 of its personnel have been killed as a result of
hostile acts, including six this year, according to the UN statistics, out of a total of around 230 deaths since the mission also began and the earlier this month, four 4 UN peacekeepers were al also killed and several others also wounded after all the fighters attacked their based in the northern town of Aguelhok. In March, some 100 heavily armed fighters on many pick-up vehicle trucks
and motorbikes attacked a military post in Tessit, killing at least 33 soldiers. The army said it killed twenty of the attackers. Nine soldiers were all killed and nine others wounded in an attack in February near the central town of the Bandiagara. Rebel attacks in central Mali typically involve the roadside bombs or the hit-and-run raids on the motorbikes or pick-up trucks. Meanwhile, insecurity
has spread across the arid scrublands of the Sahel, into the Burkina Faso and Niger, with groups exploiting the poverty of marginalised communities and inflaming the tensions between ethnic groups. Attacks grew five fold between 2016 and 2020, with 4,000 people killed in the three countries last year, up from about 770 in the 2016, according to the United Nations UN.
