Armed men attacked a military site in Mali’s capital on Tuesday morning, the West African country’s military said in a statement, blaming “a group of terrorists” for the assault. If Islamist insurgents are behind it, the attack will have brought a conflict that has ravaged vast swaths of Mali for over a decade to its capital, Bamako, for the first time since 2015.
Mali’s armed forces said that the raid had targeted a school for military police, and that operations to comb the area were underway by 9 a.m. “The situation is under control,” read the statement, which advised people to avoid the area.
Several officers were killed or injured, according to two members of Mali’s security forces, who said a dozen ambulances carried the soldiers to one of Bamako’s largest hospitals. A doctor at the hospital said that more than 20 soldiers wounded in the assault were being treated there as of Tuesday morning.
The attackers opened fire on a school for military police at Faladié, a suburb halfway between Bamako’s downtown and its airport, at around 5:30 a.m. and then entered the school, according to the two security forces members and an official within the presidential office. The attackers then progressed toward an air base camp south of the Bamako airport, they said. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to publicly comment on the attack.
Mali has been battling an Islamist insurgency for 12 years, but the conflict has been mostly concentrated in the north and center of the country and largely spared Bamako, in the southwest. Before Tuesday’s assault, the last attack in Bamako was in 2015, when Islamist militants stormed the Radisson Blu hotel and killed 20 people.
In 2020, coup plotters overthrew Mali’s elected but unpopular government, replacing it with a military junta that later appointed civilian leaders to prepare for new elections. But in 2021, before any such elections could take place, the military again ousted the civilian leaders, one of a string of coups to hit countries in a long belt across Africa’s middle in recent years.
In 2022, armed insurgents targeted a military camp 10 miles outside Bamako, bringing the threat to the doorsteps of the capital.
The attack on Tuesday took place a day after the foreign ministers of Mali and neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger met in Bamako to celebrate the first anniversary of an alliance between the three countries, all of which are run by military leaders. Early this year, the three juntas broke the countries away from a regional bloc that they had been part of for decades.
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