A United Nations (UN) report released on Monday claims more than 500 people lost their lives in attacks carried out by armed forces and Islamist groups in Mali from January to March this year, reported Aljazeera.
As per the report, the total number of people killed in the first quarter of 2022 due to rebels, self-defense groups and security forces quadrupled during the last three months of 2021, rising from 128 to 543.
The UN report pointed out that a total of 248 civilian deaths were attributable to the defense and security forces.
The killings marked a 324% rise over the previous quarter and highlighted the failure of Mali’s military junta to limit human rights abuses or militant groups from carrying out campaigns of violence.
”Malian Armed Forces, supported on certain occasions by foreign military elements, increased military operations to combat terrorism … some of which sometimes ended in serious allegations of violations of human rights,” the U.N.’s Malian mission, known as MINUSMA, said in the report.
The UN report did not identify or reveal the foreign military elements supporting the army.
MINUSMA documented 320 human rights violations by the Malian military in the January-March period, compared with 31 in the previous three months. The report said that the security forces also allegedly raped, looted, arrested, and arbitrarily detained civilians during the military operation.
Mali has been battling a jihadist insurgency since 2012. In August 2020, the military ousted the elected president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. The ruling military junta then wove closer ties with Russia, bringing in personnel it describes as military instructors. But Mali’s former colonial ruler France and others claim they are operatives of Wagner, a controversial Kremlin-linked security firm.
The arrival of Wagner personnel was one of the reasons that France announced in February the removal of its military force from Mali after nearly a decade-long deployment aimed at fighting jihadists.
