A United Nations (UN) envoy in Mali demanded Thursday that the ruling military leaders allow U.N. peacekeepers to visit the Moura village, the site of an alleged massacre by local forces and suspected Russian fighters last month, reported France 24.
According to news reports, and a detailed report released by the Human Rights Watch, around 300 civilian men were allegedly killed during a military operation from 27 to 31 March, in Moura, a rural town of around 10,000 inhabitants in the Mopti region.
As per the reports, Malian army troops and foreign soldiers rounded up several hundred men and shot dead about 300 of them, burying many in mass graves and burning others. The killings in Moura were the worst single atrocity reported in Mali’s 10-year armed conflict against Islamic extremists.
MINUSMA, the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, was able to fly over the site on April 3.
But the UN envoy for the Sahel nation, El-Ghassim Wane, told the Security Council that an integrated mission had not yet received a green light despite extensive engagement with the national authorities.
On Saturday, Mali’s military admitted that it had killed more than 200 militants in a “large-scale” assault during an operation in late March. They also claimed to have arrested about fifty militants, acting on intelligence reports that armed extremists were meeting in the central Malian town of Moura.
Mali has struggled to contain an Islamic extremist insurgency since 2012. In August 2020, Malian President Boubacar Ibrahim Keita was overthrown in a coup that included military leader Assimi Goita. Last June, Goita was sworn in as president of a transitional government after carrying out his second coup in nine months.
The latest killings in Moura are part of a spike in violence in recent months by extremists linked to Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and by Malian government security forces.
