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Senegal peacekeepers from peacekeeping forces patrol Gao, Mali, on January 15, 2017. (Jane Hahn for the Washington Post)
Dakar, Senegal – Two days after the Malian government announced that almost 100 villagers were killed in a nightmare mbadacre, officials reduced the death toll to 35, saying that they had confused misinformation about missing persons.
Twenty-four of the victims were children, the authorities said Wednesday, citing a count of police and doctors. But some community leaders insisted that the initial figure was correct, saying investigators had not discovered all the bodies in homes burned by armed men.
"He has his tribute, we have ours," Ali Dolo, mayor of the district where the attack took place, told Reuters.
The bloodshed comes as Mali, a West African country twice as big as Texas, is struggling with a surge in extremist violence and ethnic tensions.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Sobame Da, a rural community populated primarily by people of the Dogon ethnic group.
The Malian government has accused "armed men suspected of being terrorists" of "launching a deadly attack on this peaceful village". The attackers also set fire to houses and killed cattle.
The latest violence follows an ambush in March that killed more than 150 Fulani in the same area, fueling fears that the ambush was motivated by revenge.
Fighting has exploded in recent years between the two ethnic groups, which have been fighting for a long time. The Dogon people, whose roots as farmers in the region extend over several centuries, have run into Fulani, Muslim-majority pastoralists throughout Africa. ;Where is.
Islamist experts flock to Mali to aggravate the problem by sowing unrest, spreading paranoia and facilitating the arming of the population.
Each party accused the other of fueling bloodshed. Dogon rulers accused the Fulani self-defense groups of working with extremists.
The United Nations is investigating the March attack in the Mopti region of Mali, which devastated the Pulani village of Ogossago. Since March 2018, 600 people have been killed in inter-communal violence, according to estimates by the United Kingdom.
The lawyers urge the government to redouble its efforts to ease tensions and prosecute the perpetrators.
"The pace and brutality of community violence perpetrated by armed Islamists and ethnic self-defense militias is alarming and has left hundreds of people dead and dozens of villages burned down in its wake," said Corinne Dufka, director for West Africa at Human Rights. Look, who also looks at the attacks.
Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga stepped down as prime minister in April after being criticized for failing to protect his citizens – weeks after his visit to Washington to ask for help in the United States.
Maiga warned at the time that the fall of the Islamic State in Syria could push more fighters to visit the Sahel, a region comprising parts of Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso. The weak borders and underfunding of the troops compound the problem, he said.
The vast expanse of desert and semi-arid lands is home to activists linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Islamist violence has doubled every year in the region since 2016, according to the African Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. The number of deaths has increased in the last three years, from 218 to at least 1,110.
Mali, where four Islamist groups are active, remains at the epicenter, the group said, accounting for two-thirds of the bloodshed since 2018.
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