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At least 20 people, including children, were killed in airstrikes at a wedding in central Mali over the weekend, local villagers said, causing confusion as to whether the dead could have been killed. be caused by French forces fighting Islamist groups in the Sahel region of West Africa.
On Tuesday, the French army told AFP it killed a rally of dozens of jihadists in central Mali’s Hombori region on Sunday with fighter jets as part of an ongoing campaign against jihadists in the Sahel region.
But several villagers and a local group said 20 people, including children, died on the same day when a helicopter strike hit a wedding ceremony in Bounty, a few miles west of Hombori.
“An airstrike claimed the lives of twenty civilians in the village of Bounty. These civilians were celebrating their children’s weddings,” Tabital Pulaaku said on Facebook on Facebook on Monday.
It is not known if the strikes described by the villagers and the French army are the same. The French army denies having killed civilians.
“There can be no doubt or ambiguity, there was no marriage,” a French military source close to the operation told AFP. “This was a strike that was carried out after a particularly strict multi-party process against a fully identified armed terrorist group, after having gathered information, intentions, posture, in a studied area.”
Witnesses said the helicopter opened fire on a crowd gathered for a wedding. Dozens of injured have been sent to hospitals in the region.
“We were surprised by the intensity of the strike,” Mady Dicko, a villager, told AFP. “The helicopter was flying very low.”
A man who was injured in the wedding strike told The Associated Press that Islamist extremists approached a group gathered for a wedding and demanded that men attend separately from women.
“We were carrying out the orders when I heard the sound of a plane and immediately a strike from above. After that I did not see anything because I was unconscious,” said the man from a health center in Douentza.
France has deployed thousands of troops to Mali and neighboring countries as part of Operation Barkhane, which killed dozens of Islamist fighters in the Sahel region.
Last week, five French soldiers perished in bombings in Mali, making it one of the deadliest since France’s first intervention in the region in 2013.
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