Nine soldiers in G5 Sahel force killed by Mali landmine

Nine soldiers in the five-nation G5 Sahel anti-jihadist force were killed in central Mali on Friday when their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device, the Malian army said.

The incident happened at Boulkessy, in the Mopti region, it said on its internet site.

“Nine FAMa soldiers died,” it said, using the acronym for the Malian armed forces.

The attack also left a number of wounded “who require urgent treatment,” a military official told AFP.

The troops were deployed with the G5 Sahel, a force designed to pool the military strengths of  Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger to fight jihadism and lawlessness in the region.

Mali has been struggling to return to stability after Al-Qaeda-linked extremists took control of the north in early 2012, prompting a military intervention by France.

Although they were routed in the French operation in 2013, large stretches of the landlocked state remain out of government control.

Most of the violence is centered in Mali’s central and southern regions but it has also spread across its borders, affecting neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

The latest attacks occurred close to a location where 17 Malian civilians were killed on Tuesday when a booby-trapped corpse blew up.

The body was that of a man who had gone to find food for his cattle and never returned.

His parents went looking for him, found the corpse and unwittingly triggered the device.

“Booby-trapping a corpse to try to inflict additional casualties is a foul act and a grave crime. Those behind such an outrage should be put on trial and sentenced,” Mahamat Saleh Annadif, head of the UN peacekeeping force in Mali, MINUSMA, said on Thursday.

On February 14, jihadists in neighbouring Burkina Faso used an identical method, rigging a corpse dressed in military fatigues with explosives. The blast killed two police officers and an army doctor.

Created in 2015, the French-backed G5 Sahel has currently mustered 4,000 out of a proposed 5,000-man force.

The scheme, which brings together five of the world’s poorest and most fragile countries, has run into problems of financing, poor equipment and lack of training.

Last June, its then headquarters, in the central Malian town of Sevare, came under suicide attack, causing three deaths, two of them Malian soldiers.

Its commanding officer, Malian General Didier Dacko, was replaced by a Mauritanian, Hanena Ould Sidi, who in September ordered the HQ be moved to Bamako, Mali’s capital.