[ad_1]
Nobody took responsibility for the attack, which occurred a month before the elections. In the countryside, French troops help fight jihadists
Attack in Mali
An attack on a military patrol in northern Mali killed two civilians and wounded up to eight French soldiers on Sunday (1), the Malian Ministry of Defense reported.
The attack occurred two days after Islamist militants killed at least six people in an attack on a military headquarters in central Mali, a country where French troops are helping to fight the jihadists in their vast deserts.
"I confirm that a car – A bomb hit a joint patrol Barkhane / Mechelen," said the spokesman of the Ministry of Defense, Boubacar Diallo. Barkhane is the name of the French force of about 4,000 men distributed in the former colonies of the Sahel region.
About 12 people were injured in Sunday's attack, including four to eight French Barkhane soldiers, Diallo said. The army spokesman, Patrik Steiger, confirmed that civilians had been killed during an attack on Gao and that the army was checking the state of the French patrol of 30 men who had been attacked.
Nobody took responsibility for the attack, which occurred a month before the presidential elections scheduled for the end of the year. But the violence of Islamist militants has proliferated in recent years in the sparsely populated Sahel with groups linked to al Qaeda and Daesh (also known as the United States).
The Western Hemisphere provided significant resources to a regional force composed of soldiers from Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mauritania to fight jihadists.
. But the so-called G5 force was hampered by delays in the release of money and the lack of coordination among the five countries.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who complained last year that the G5 was taking too long to install, is expected to discuss security in Mauritania on Monday.
Copyright Thomson Reuters 2018
Source link
