Mali

[…] Up to 600 troops will be deployed in Mali as part of the European Union's training mission EUTM, 150 troops more than under the current mandate, government and defence sources said. … The cabinet also gave the green light for extending by one year Germany's participation in the United Nations' peacekeeping force in Mali, upholding the current level of up to 1,100 troops which are mainly based in the northern town of Gao.

The Council approved conclusions reaffirming the importance of a solid and long-term partnership between the EU and the Sahel, and of stepping up that partnership through an ambitious EU strategy setting the framework for its policies and actions in the region.

Mali’s transitional government has announced presidential and legislative elections will take place next February, saying it was honouring the timetable it promised to the international community after taking power months after a military coup last year.

With a deteriorating security situation in central and northern Mali, the UN peacekeeping chief told the Security Council on Tuesday that ‘blue helmets’, the Malian Defence and Security Forces, continue to suffer repeated attacks and significant losses, while some large towns “live under constant threat from armed groups”.

In each of the past four years, the number of civilians killed in Mali has exceeded the previous year’s death toll, and this alarming trend is largely the result of the relentless growth and spread of intercommunal violence across central Mali. … CIVIC’s policy brief … explores two core questions: Why did MINUSMA develop formal EW/RR [early warning and rapid response] procedures? And how are these new procedures intended to improve the effectiveness of MINUSMA’s EW/RR response system?

A deadly attack on Friday against peacekeepers serving with the UN mission in Mali, MINUSMA, has been condemned in the strongest terms by the UN Secretary-General. Four peacekeepers from Chad were killed, and 19 others wounded, when armed elements launched a complex attack against the mission’s camp in Aguelhok, located in the Kidal region in the northeast of the country.  

France’s defense minister said she would not allow the honor of French forces to be “sullied” on Thursday, two days after the UN said a French strike killed 19 civilians in Mali.

Ten days after armed groups carried out a deadly attack on three villages near the western Niger town of Tillia, UN humanitarians have repeated their call for greater protection of civilians and all those displaced by violence in the Sahel.

The new president of Niger on Monday called France’s anti-jihadist force in West Africa a “relative failure” despite years of efforts, and said a partial troop drawdown would have only a limited impact.

A French airstrike in central Mali on January 3 killed 19 civilians and three armed men, according to excerpts from a United Nations investigation due to be released later on Tuesday, contradicting French claims that only Islamist militants were hit.