Mali

At least 23 people have been killed and 300 missing after an attack on Sunday on a village of Fulani herders in central Mali where communal violence has surged in recent months, a local mayor said.

Unidentified gunmen on motorcycles attacked two villages in central Mali, killing at least 41 people in a part of the country where ethnic reprisal attacks surged in recent months, a local mayor said.

The G5 Sahel force includes Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Niger as well as Mali, and people in Bamako do not want its headquarters based there.

Addressing the Security Council at UN Headquarters in New York on Wednesday, the head of the UN Mission in Mali, MINUSMA, said that amid ongoing violence, including scores of civilian deaths and deadly attacks on UN peacekeepers, a critical phase of the peace process had now been reached. Mahamat Saleh Annadif expressed his belief that the existing peace accord between armed groups and the Malian Government still provides opportunities for real progress, over the next six to 12 months.

Nearly 100 people were reportedly killed during an attack on a traditional Dogon hunters’ village in Mali on Sunday, prompting a call from UN chief António Guterres for authorities to act fast and “bring the perpetrators to justice”. … MINUSMA is currently deploying a special human rights fact-finding mission to investigate and bolster the Malian authorities in their judicial investigations.

The expansion of extremism shows the flaws in current strategies and the need to rethink regional responses.

‘It’s no longer just the Sahel, it’s coastal West Africa’: A surge in violence across West Africa’s Sahel has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and left thousands dead since January, as Islamist militants with links to al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State extend their reach across the region at a time when they are losing ground in their Middle Eastern strongholds.

West African states fighting Islamist militancy in the region should not take France’s military presence for granted because Paris will not be there forever, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Tuesday.

Violence is tearing Mali and the Sahel apart. But who are the armed groups behind the bloodshed? Where are international actors stationed in the region? And what motivates them all? This project maps jihadist and non-jihadist groups and pinpoints the presence of external actors in the region as of May 2019.