Malian troops subdued the Muslim militants who attacked a military training camp and the airport in Mali’s capital on Tuesday after gunbattles that killed some soldiers, authorities said.
An al-Qaeda-linked group claimed the attack.
The militants tried to infiltrate the Faladie military police school in Bamako in a rare attack for the capital before government troops were able to “neutralize” the attackers, Malian Army Chief of Staff Oumar Diarra said on national TV, without elaborating.
Photo: EPA-EFE
At least 15 suspects were arrested, a security official who was inside the training camp at the time of the attack said.
He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
“This cowardly and perfidious attack led to some losses of life on the army’s side,” the Malian Army said in a statement read on national television in the evening, confirming that trainees at the military training camp were killed, but not saying how many.
Malian Army also confirmed the militants targeted the airport.
The al-Qaeda-linked militant group JNIM claimed responsibility for the attacks on its Web site Azallaq. Videos posted by JNIM show fighters setting a plane on fire. The group claimed to have inflicted “major human and material losses.”
Earlier on Tuesday, there were two explosions in the area and smoke rose from a location on the outskirts of the city where the camp and airport are located.
Soon after the attacks, Malian authorities closed the airport, with Malian Ministry of Transport spokesman Mohamed Ould Mamouni saying flights were suspended because of the exchange of gunfire nearby.
The airport reopened later in the day.
The US embassy in Bamako told its staff to remain at home and stay off the roads.
Mali, along with its neighbors Burkina Faso and Niger, has for more than a decade battled an insurgency fought by armed groups, including some allied with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Following military coups in all three nations over the past few years, the ruling juntas have expelled French forces and turned to Russian mercenary units for security assistance instead.
Since taking power, Malian Interim President Colonel Assimi Goita has struggled to stave off radicals’ attacks. Attacks in central and northern Mali are increasing. In July, about 50 Russian mercenaries in a convoy were killed in an al-Qaeda ambush.
However, attacks in the capital of Bamako are rare.
“I think JNIM wanted to show they can also stage attacks in the south and in the capital, following the battle on the north near the Algeria border where Wagner suffered losses,” said Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which promotes democracy.
In 2022, gunmen struck a Malian Army checkpoint about 60km outside the city, killing at least six people and wounding several others. In 2015, another al-Qaeda-linked extremist group killed at least 20 people, including a US citizen, during an attack on a hotel in Bamako.
Tuesday’s attack is significant because it showed that JNIM is capable of staging a large-scale attack, said Wassim Nasr, a journalist and senior research fellow at the Soufan Center.
It also shows they are concentrating on military targets, rather than random attacks on civilians, he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing