Mali: Russian paramilitaries killed 9 civilians, HRW says

Human Rights Watch said Thursday that Russian paramilitaries from Africa Corps killed nine civilians, including four children, during an operation in central Mali last month.

The rights group said more than 100 Russian fighters, accompanied by several Malian soldiers, stormed Bombori village in the Mopti region at dawn on July 10 while looking for jihadists.

HRW said the fighters broke into homes in an ethnic Fulani neighbourhood and rounded up at least 80 men and boys under a tree. It said the men and boys were beaten, questioned about alleged links to Islamist armed groups and threatened with death if they withheld information.

The group said six civilians were shot dead after trying to flee, and three others were detained and executed, one of them by beheading. Residents later recovered nine bodies, HRW said: five men and four children aged between six and 17.

HRW said it remotely interviewed 13 people, including four witnesses to the attack and nine civil society members and community leaders.

The group said Bombori had been under the control of the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, known as JNIM, since 2017 and that its fighters had a base nearby.

Mali has faced a security crisis since 2012 involving jihadist groups allied to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group, as well as criminal gangs and armed separatists. Mali's ruling junta, which came to power in coups in 2020 and 2021, has moved away from former colonial power France and closer to Russia militarily and politically.