An Islamist group affiliated with Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for a deadly assault on two military sites in Mali’s capital, Bamako, on Tuesday, bringing a conflict that has ravaged vast swaths of the West African country to the city for the first time since 2015.
The attacks could raise questions about the security strategy of Mali’s military leaders, who overthrew the government and seized power in 2020 — the first in a string of coups in the region. The junta has since ejected the thousands of French forces that had been helping tackle the Islamist insurgency, embracing a military alliance with Russia and mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner private military group instead.
The first target on Tuesday was a school for military police in Faladié, a neighborhood halfway between Bamako’s downtown and its airport. Attackers opened fire around 5:30 a.m. and then entered the school, according to two security force members and an official in the presidential office.
They said the attackers then made their way toward an air base south of the Bamako airport. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to comment publicly on the attack.
Mali’s armed forces blamed “a group of terrorists” for the assault and said that as of 9 a.m., it was working to clear the area around the school. “The situation is under control,” the armed forces said in a statement, advising people to avoid the area.
Hours later, the Islamist group JNIM, which the U.S. government has designated as a terrorist organization, issued a statement saying it was behind that attack and a later one on an air base south of Bamako’s airport. Videos posted to social media and verified by The New York Times showed a thick plume of smoke rising near Bamako’s airport.
Several officers were killed or injured, according to the 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.
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, largely sparing Bamako, in the southwest. Before Tuesday’s assault, the last attack on the capital was in 2015, when Islamist militants stormed the Radisson Blu hotel and killed 20 people, including an American.
But in recent years, counterterrorism analysts have warned that the introduction of Russian security forces was exacerbating the threat in the region.
The coup plotters who overthrew Mali’s unpopular elected government in 2020 replaced it with a military junta that later appointed civilian leaders to prepare for new elections. But in 2021, before elections could take place, the military again ousted the civilian leaders.
Mali’s military has suffered regular, severe losses against insurgents. In 2022, gunmen targeted a military camp 10 miles outside Bamako, bringing the threat to the doorstep of the capital.
Last September, Islamist militants killed 49 civilians and 15 soldiers in separate attacks on a passenger ferry and a military camp in the country’s north.
And in late July this year, an unknown number of Malian soldiers and about 50 mercenaries from the Wagner group were killed in clashes with rebels near the border with Algeria — one of the deadliest battles ever recorded by Wagner outside Ukraine.
Col. Assimi Goïta, Mali’s interim leader, has boasted of some victories against armed groups. But violence against civilians, committed by insurgents as well as Malian soldiers and their Russian allies, has spiked under his rule, according to researchers.
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 among 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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