Immediately united, immediately struck. Sunday 1is December, eight figures from the Tuareg community, including five executives of the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a new rebel group in northern Mali created the day before, were killed by drone strikes near Tin Zaouatine, a few kilometers from the border with Algeria.
Among the victims, Fahad Ag Almahmoud, former secretary general of the Tuareg self-defense group Imghad and allies (Gatia), as well as two executives of the former National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and the High Council for the Unity of Azawad, announced the FLA in a press release released on Sunday.
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The day before, these movements, created during the outbreak of the secessionist conflict against the Malian state in 2012, had recorded their dissolution and their merger within the new FLA following a meeting, also organized in Tin Zaouatine, but about sixty kilometers from the site of the drone strikes, according to several FLA executives contacted by Le Monde Africa.
According to consistent sources, the Bayraktar Akinci drones, of Turkish manufacture and received by the junta of General Assimi Goïta a few days earlier in Bamako, are at the origin of these strikes in Tin Zaouatine.
A “major special operation”
On July 27, near this locality extending on either side of the border between Mali and Algeria, rebel groups inflicted a heavy defeat on the Malian army and its auxiliaries of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner . According to the rebels, 47 Malian soldiers and 84 Russian mercenaries were killed. The counter-offensive prepared by Bamako in September to cleanse this affront was finally canceled at the last minute due to operational and logistical fears.
Four months later, General Goïta's junta, which took power following two coups in August 2020 and May 2021, takes its revenge. Monday, December 2, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces confirmed in a press release “the neutralization of several high-ranking executives” of these groups, described as “ terrorists ».
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If the Malian army welcomed this ” success “described as“major special operation”, the rebels are skeptical of his planning. “They attacked out of pure opportunity. If they had really planned an operation, they would have struck the day before, during the meeting in which all the military leaders of our movements and their cadres, approximately 180 people, participated. underlines Attaye Ag Mohamed, one of the FLA executives.
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