Worst terrorist attack stokes anger over Mali’s response

Bloomberg

One of the deadliest extremist attacks in the seven-year insurgency in Mali has stoked fresh anger over the government’s failure to halt raids, months after protests forced the prime minister to resign.
The Sahel region, the arid band on the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert, is experiencing unprecedented levels of violence as militants seek to extend their influence across West Africa. Terrorist threats are spreading in Burkina Faso and to border areas with Benin, Ghana and Togo to the south, according to the United Nations.
The increasing insecurity is draining state coffers in the affected countries: Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries, and Mali allocate about a fifth of their annual budgets to defense.
The latest attacks targeted two Malian army bases, including one at Boulkessi in a desolate area near the Burkina Faso border where at least 41 soldiers died. Several dozen others are still missing and details about the raid have been slow to emerge. Al-Qaeda’s West Africa affiliate claimed responsibility for the raids.
There have been protests over the violence in the capital, Bamako, and other towns. As the government was compiling a death toll, the wives and children of army personnel took to the streets, demanding to know the fate of their loved ones.
“We wanted to know the situation of our husbands who are at the frontline,” said Namsa Kone Diallo, one of the organisers of the recent march.
Soldiers’ wives blocked Prime Minister Boubou Cisse’s convoy from entering a military camp in the Mopti region. The soldiers demanded better equipment and training before the troops were deployed to dangerous posts such as Boulkessi.
Mali has been engulfed in conflict since a loose alliance of ethnic Tuareg separatists and fighters with ties to Algeria and Libya seized large swathes of the north in 2012. A French military intervention succeeded in pushing back the insurgents a year later, but al-Qaeda-linked militants are now encroaching on Mali’s more densely
populated central region. A 15,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping mission is struggling to cope and often treated with hostility by the population.
“The Bamako government lacks a clear strategy on how to tackle the violence,” said Issa Ndiaye, a political analyst at the University of Bamako. “As the population continues to lose faith in the government and the security forces, I only see the violence escalating.” The extremist presence is increasingly fuelling inter-communal conflict.
Attacks by militants and escalating clashes between farmer and herder communities in Burkina Faso has forced more than 500,000 people to flee their homes since the beginning of the year, 267,000 of whom have fled in the past three months alone, according to humanitarian organisations.
More than 500 people were killed in 472 attacks and counter-military operations since last year, UN Refugee agency spokesman Mbogori told reporters in Geneva.
In March, Malian traditional hunters razed an ethnic Fulani village and killed 157 men, women and children, prompting a massive demonstration
in the capital, Bamako, that led to the fall of the government and the firing of top military commanders.
President Mahamadou Issoufou of neighbouring Niger urged Mali at a high-level Sahel summit last month to deal more effectively with the insurgency.