Malian leader pledges safety as massacre kills 160 dead

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita promised on Monday to strengthen security while traveling to a village where more than 160 people were killed by suspected militiamen belonging to a rival ethnic group.

"We need security here – that is your mission," said Keita, giving public order to the army chief, General Aboulaye Coulibaly, named abruptly Sunday after the mbadacre.

"Justice will be done," he swore.

The deadly raid took place Saturday in the village of Ogbadogou, home to the Fulani cattle community, near the town of Mopti, in central Mali.

A militia of the Dogon ethnic group – a community of hunters and agriculturalists with a long history of tension with the Fulani about access to land – is suspected of having led the raid.

Public television ORTM announced Sunday a "provisional badessment" of 136 deaths.

A local official and a source of Malian security forces said Monday that the number of casualties had risen to 160 and that it could still increase.

"The new count is 160 dead and it will probably be even higher," said the city councilor Amadou Diallo, denouncing an attack that, in his opinion, equates to "ethnic cleansing."

An AFP journalist said Monday that many houses in the village had been burned and that the floor was littered with corpses.

"I have never seen anything like that – they have come, shot people, burned houses, killed babies," said 75-year-old survivor Ali Diallo.

The authors "are not jihadists, they are traditional hunters," an AFP health official said.

This government photo shows a woman standing in front of a village house near Mopti that was attacked on Saturday. By Document (MALIAN PRESIDENCY / AFP)

Aurelian Tobie, chief expert for the Sahel region at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told AFP: "It is very difficult to identify with certainty who is a militiaman, a jihadist, "enemy" of whom ".

"Everyone is armed, but membership in one group or another fluctuates according to personal, family, community or circumstantial interests," he said.

The victims, many of them women and children, were shot with machetes or stabbings, a security official told AFP.

This is the deadliest attack in Mali since the 2013 French-led military intervention that pushed back the jihadist groups that had taken control of the country's north.

Jihadist raids remain a persistent threat and, in the center of the country, an ethnic mosaic, the attacks have had a bloody impact on groups with a history of rivalry.

The Fulani have been accused of supporting a jihadist preacher, Amadou Kufa, who became known in central Mali four years ago.

So-called self-defense groups have appeared in the Dogon community in the declared role of providing protection against insurgents.

But these militias also used their status to attack the Fulani.

"Hateful crimes"

Violence between the Fulani and the Dogon and between the Fulani and Bambara ethnic groups claimed nearly 500 civilian casualties last year, according to UN figures.

Fatou Bensouda, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), on Monday condemned the "vicious attacks" and urged "all parties to refrain from resorting to violence".

A soldier walked into the rubble after the attack, in the handout submitted by the government. By Document (MALIAN PRESIDENCY / AFP)

She urged "the investigation and prosecution of those who participated or contributed in one way or another to what appear to be flagrant crimes that could the jurisdiction of the ICC ".

In January, Dogon fighters were accused of killing 37 people in another Fulani village, Koulogon, in the same region.

On Sunday, Keita sacked the army and aviation chiefs and replaced the armed forces chief of staff, Bemba Moussa Keita, in Coulibaly.

The Dogon militia, named Dan Nan Ambbadagou, was sentenced to disbandment.