BAMAKO, March 8 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The French army says it has killed one of the leaders of al-Qaida in Mali. The news comes as French forces are preparing to withdraw from the country.
The French army said in a press release that Algerian Yahia Djouadi, one of the leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, was killed during the night of Feb 25-26.
The press release says he was “neutralized” during a ground operation supported by a helicopter and two drones, north of Timbuktu, Mali.
Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb has claimed responsibility for several attacks in the Sahel region, including the 2015 terrorist attack on a Bamako hotel and a 2016 attack on a hotel in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and has taken several Western hostages.
Mali’s military government, which seized power in a coup ten months ago, asked France last month to withdraw its troops from Malian territory immediately, following an announcement from French President Emmanuel Macron that the troops would be pulled out over a period of four to six months.
The French military first intervened in Mali in 2013 in an operation to take back control of northern Mali from Islamist militants in Operation Serval. The Operation was replaced by Operation Barkhane in 2014.
But the ongoing insurgency has continued and violence has moved from the north into the center of the country.
In another development, a convoy from the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali (MINUSMA) hit an improvised explosive device north of Mopti on Monday, killing at least two ‘blue helmets’, and wounding four others.
In a statement, MINUSMA said the peacekeepers were part of a logistics convoy on its way to Timbuktu.
The UN Special Representative and head of MINUSMA, El-Ghassim WANE, strongly condemned the attack in the volatile central region of Mali, where Government forces have been fighting an Islamist insurgency for the past decade.
Wane “recalls that attacks targeting United Nations peacekeepers may constitute war crimes under international law. He calls on the Malian authorities to spare no effort to identify the perpetrators of these attacks so that they can be quickly brought to justice.”
In a separate attack on Monday on Government forces, at least two soldiers died in the northern region of Gao, just three days after another clash with insurgents left 27 dead, and 32 wounded, according to news reports.
The growing insecurity in the central region has fed the humanitarian crisis in the country, along with deep political uncertainty, following military coups in 2020 and 2021.
Last month, the UN launched its 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan, seeking $686 million from donors to help more than five million of Mali’s most vulnerable citizens. — NNN-AGENCIES
