Fresh attack pushes Mali army death toll to 51

Bamako, Nov 4 (AFP/APP): A day after dozens of Malian soldiers died in a devastating militant raid on a military base, a roadside bomb killed two more troops in the violence-wracked West African country, the army said Sunday.

Six soldiers were also injured in the latest in a string of attacks underscoring the fragility of a region where growing militant violence has claimed hundreds of lives.

The attack on Saturday occurred when the soldiers’ armoured vehicle hit an improvised explosive device in the central region of Mopti, the army said in a tweet.

Mali is fighting a militant insurgency with the help of UN peacekeepers and a French force in place in the region since 2014.

It is one of the countries in the Sahel region of Africa that has been caught in the eye of the militant storm since 2012, along with Niger, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

Saturday’s attack followed the death of 49 Malian soldiers on Friday in a raid by militants on a military base at Indelimane, near Menaka in the eastern Gao region that borders Niger.

A French soldier also died in Gao on Saturday after his armoured vehicle struck an improvised explosive device.

A Malian army officer told AFP that Friday’s surprise attack was by gunmen riding motorbikes, the favoured means of transport of the militant fighters in the region.

According to a UN report on the attack that AFP was able to consult, three different groups attacked the Indelimane military base simultaneously.

IS claims responsibility for deadly Mali attacks

MINUSMA, the 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, helped the army build the base last year. So too did soldiers from France’s 4,500-strong Barkhane force, deployed in the Sahel region of Africa since 2014.

The French soldier killed by the roadside bomb attack Saturday belonged to that force.

The Islamic State group claimed both Friday’s attack on at Indelimane and the roadside bomb that killed the French soldier in a statement Saturday signed from its “West African province”.

A spokesman for the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, the group’s branch in the Sahel, confirmed to AFP on Sunday that they had carried out the attack.