BAMAKO (Reuters) – Islamist militants attacked a military training camp and other sites in Mali’s capital on Tuesday, sparking deadly gun battles and temporarily closing a nearby airport before troops subdued the attackers, officials said. No details of casualties were immediately available.
The gunmen tried to infiltrate the Valade gendarmerie school in Bamako in a rare attack on the capital, prompting government forces to launch a sweep and later “neutralize” the attackers, army chief of staff Oumar Diarra said on national television, without elaborating.
A security official told The Associated Press that the attack caused “losses in lives and material damage,” but did not provide numbers or details. The official, who was inside the training camp at the time of the attack, said at least 15 suspects had been detained. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
Later, the army said the militants also attacked other locations, but did not provide details.
The al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) claimed responsibility for the attacks on its Azallaq website. Videos posted by the group on the site show fighters setting fire to a plane at the airport. The group claimed to have inflicted “significant human and material losses.”
An Associated Press reporter said he heard two explosions in the area earlier Tuesday and saw smoke rising from a site on the outskirts of the city where the camp and airport are located.
Shortly after the attacks, Malian authorities closed the airport, with transport ministry spokesman Mohamed Ould Mamouni saying flights had been halted because of a nearby gunfight. The airport reopened later in the day.
The US Embassy in Bamako has asked its staff to stay home and stay off the roads.
Mali, along with its neighbors Burkina Faso and Niger, has been embroiled in more than a decade of insurgencies by armed groups, including some allied with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Following coups in all three countries in recent years, ruling military juntas have established control over parts of the country. Expel French forces And I went to Russian mercenary units For security assistance instead.
Since taking power, Colonel Assimi Goita has struggled to fend off increasing jihadist attacks. Attacks are on the rise in central and northern Mali. In July, some 50 Russian mercenaries in a convoy were killed in an al-Qaeda ambush.
The mercenaries were mostly fighting Tuareg rebels alongside the Malian army when their convoy was forced to retreat into jihadist territory and was ambushed south of the town of Tinzaoutine.
However, attacks in the capital, Bamako, are rare.
“I think JNIM wanted to show that it could carry out attacks in the south and also in the capital, after the battle in the north near the Algerian border where Wagner suffered losses,” said Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel programme at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which works to promote democracy.
In 2022, militants attacked a Malian army checkpoint about 60 kilometres (40 miles) outside the city, killing at least six people and wounding several others. In 2015, another extremist group linked to al-Qaeda attacked a Malian army checkpoint about 60 kilometres (40 miles) outside the city. At least 20 people killedincluding an American, during an attack on a hotel in Bamako.
Tuesday’s attack is significant because it showed that JNIM has the capacity to launch a large-scale attack, Wassim Nasr, a journalist and senior researcher at the Soufan Center, told The Associated Press.
He added that this also shows that they are focusing their efforts on military targets, not on indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets.
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Sam Mednick reported from Goma, Congo, and Bancherou from Dakar, Senegal.
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