French soldiers sit next to an armoured ambulance vehicle in Gao, during Operation Gustav, a hunt for Islamist fighters in a valley in northern Mali and one of France’s largest military operations during its three-month intervention in its former colony.
AFP/Bamako
Five Malian soldiers died yesterday when their helicopter crashed in the centre of the war-torn west African nation, local government and army sources told AFP.
“The crash of a Malian army helicopter killed all five passengers, Malian soldiers. This happened near Sevare. The Malian army is in mourning,” a local official from the Mopti regional administration told AFP.
A Malian military source confirmed the incident, saying that a colonel was among the five dead and the cause was mechanical failure.
A suicide bomber meanwhile killed at least three Chadian soldiers in Mali yesterday, military sources said, in a deadly demonstration of the troubled nation’s ongoing security crisis days after France began withdrawing its troops.
The soldiers were shopping in the northern city of Kidal when an Islamist bomber struck, according to Malian and Chadian sources who gave a provisional toll of three soldiers killed and four wounded.
“Three Chadian soldiers were killed in an attack yesterday in Kidal. It was jihadists who did it. The toll is still provisional,” a Malian military source told AFP while a Chadian source spoke of “three Chadian soldiers killed and four others injured”.
No details were initially available on how the attack was carried out.
“The centre of Kidal is now sealed off. This is an Islamist attack against the Chadian troops,” said one regional security source.
Located 1,500km northeast of Bamako, Kidal houses bases for the French and Chadian armies who provide security while the city is run by Tuareg rebels from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA).
It is the chief town of a region of the same name that includes the Ifoghas mountains, where French and Chadian soldiers have spent several weeks hunting and engaging entrenched Islamist fighters.
The city has already seen two suicide bombings, on February 21 and 26, the first targeting French military and killing the driver of the car bomb and the second killing seven MNLA members manning a checkpoint.
Former Burundian president Pierre Buyoya, the African Union representative in Bamako, condemned yesterday’s attack during a press conference in the Malian capital.
He said the 6,000-strong African-led International Support Mission to Mali and its partners were “determined to help the brother country of Mali to ensure the security of all of its territory”.
The attack came at the end of a week in which French troops began an early withdrawal from Mali three months after ousting armed Islamists from the country’s north.
Paris pulled out 100 soldiers ahead of schedule on Monday as part of a phased withdrawal of the majority of its 4,000 troops.
France has said it will leave 2,000 soldiers on the ground throughout the summer, reducing its presence by the end of the year to a “support force” of 1,000 fighting alongside a UN-mandated army of some 11,000 troops.
But the attack will turn the spotlight on Mali’s poorly paid, ill-equipped and badly organised military which fell apart last year in the face of an uprising by Tuareg rebels and then an Islamist occupation of the north.
The cities of Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal fell in March 2012 to Tuareg rebels who took advantage of the chaos following a coup to declare independence for the entire desert north before losing control to Islamist insurgents.
The extremists terrorised locals with amputations and executions performed under their interpretation of Islamic law, drawing global condemnation.
While French-led troops have inflicted severe losses on the Islamists, driving them from Mali’s northern cities, soldiers are still battling significant pockets of resistance around Gao.
One thousand French soldiers have been conducting an operation to destroy Islamist infrastructure in a valley north of Gao since Sunday while an EU mission is training Malian soldiers to improve their chances of containing the insurgents.
Mali’s Prime Minister Diango Cissoko called on France yesterday to keep a permanent military presence in Mali.
The international community, particularly the US, has voiced concerns over security and is pushing for a formal process of reconciliation between the deeply divided nation’s diverse ethnic communities ahead of elections scheduled for July.
Many questions remain about the possibility of holding polls so soon due to continued instability in the north, which has still not seen the return of some 400,000 who forced from their homes by the conflict.
Some 74,000 Malian refugees displaced by war and ethnic tensions are suffering “deplorable” conditions in Mauritanian desert camps, with just one toilet between 3,000 people, aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors Without Borders in English) said in a report yesterday.
“When an extension was added to Mbera camp to accommodate the new refugees arriving in January 2013, our teams witnessed a situation where there were only four latrines for 12,000 people,” MSF said.
“Humanitarian standards call for a minimum of one latrine for every 20 people”, added the group, complaining that humanitarian assistance at the Mbera camp was insufficient.
While there is “some improvement” at the camps, conditions remain “deplorable” and with no end in sight to the refugee crisis, “the challenge will be to continue to provide assistance that meets humanitarian standards”, the report said.
MSF said that the displaced at the Mbera camp were also suffering from food insecurity and a lack of basic services, but there was no famine as “rations have improved, food is sufficient now”, said MSF emergency official Marie-Christine Ferir.
But water and shelter is scarce as temperatures soar to 50 degrees Celsius.
Refugees receive 11 litres of water a day on average but need 20 for cooking, drinking and personal hygiene.
Children “should get a ration rich in milk and micronutrients so as to avoid malnutrition”, Ferir added.
The death rate among children has soared, according to Ferir.
She added: “It is currently above the emergency level,” she said, adding that on average two children under the age of two die every day at Mbera, where most refugees are Tuareg, with a large group of Arabs.
“They will not move away any time soon for fear of reprisals,” said Ferir. “Arabs and Tuareg communities have faced attacks as they are seen as sympathising with Al Qaeda-linked rebels
After an earlier rebellion in the 1990s, “some stayed for several years”, Ferir added.
Many Malian villages close to the Mauritanian border have been totally or partially abandoned since the outbreak of unrest last year.
The report also contains some harrowing testimony from those who have fled the fighting.
“I was poor in Mali, but here it’s even worse. I’ve got absolutely nothing. Also, I feel completely foreign and far away from my home country,” MSF cited 40-year-old Azarra from Timbuktu as saying.
“My daughter gave birth here and we had nothing for the baby. He’s still suffering from malnutrition and he has been admitted to the MSF programme,” added the refugee.
