Mali

Two Egyptian peacekeepers serving with the UN Mission in Mali, MINUSMA, were killed on Friday - the second fatal attack this week on a peacekeeping convoy in the West African country. 

Mali's military junta will take 24 months from March 2022 to restore civilian rule after an August 2020 coup, its spokesman said on Monday, the latest move in negotiations with regional bloc ECOWAS to lift sanctions crippling the economy

[…] For roughly an hour, the convoy came under direct fire from suspected members of a terrorist group using small arms and rocket launchers.  Four Jordanian peacekeepers serving with the UN Mission in Mali, MINUSMA, were injured in the attack, one of whom died from his injuries after being evacuated. 

Civilian deaths and rights abuses attributable to the Malian armed forces and backed by “foreign military elements” have surged in the first quarter of 2022, a United Nations report has said, with the killings seeing a 324 percent rise during the previous quarter.

The EU will leave its military training mission in Mali suspended, but will not terminate it for the time being, the bloc’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said on Tuesday (May 17).

Terrorism in the Sahel is a slow-burning, mortal threat, a senior United Nations peace operations official told the Security Council today as speakers expressed alarm about the recent departure of Mali from the region’s security architecture.

A colonel reputed to be close to Mali's ruling junta has been arrested following what the authorities describe as an attempted coup, two sources said Tuesday. The junta late Monday announced that last week it had thwarted a would-be putsch led by army officers and "supported by a Western state."

Mali said Sunday it was withdrawing from a west African force fighting jihadists to protest it being rejected as head of the G5 regional group, which also includes Mauritania, Chad, Burkina, and Niger.

Germany on Wednesday said it had agreed to raise its contingent in the UN's MINUSMA peacekeeping mission in Mali to a maximum of 1,400 troops from around 1,100. The German government has also decided to reduce its training mission as part of the EU's deployment EUTM, halving its upper limit from 600 to 300. Most of the redeployed forces will be moved to neighboring Niger.

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