According to UN experts, the armed group now governs vast portions of the Ansongo region in northern Gao as well as rural areas in eastern Menaka.
According to a recent analysis by United Nations experts, the militant organisation ISIL (ISIS) has nearly doubled its territory in Mali in less than a year.
ISIL and an al-Qaeda branch operating in the area have been given the opportunity “to re-enact the 2012 scenario” as a result of the peace agreement’s sluggish implementation and persistent attacks on towns, it claimed.
The West African nation saw a military coup in that year, and two months later, insurgents in the north established “an Islamic state.” With the aid of a military effort sponsored by France, the rebels were driven from power in the north, but in 2015 they relocated from the desolate north to the more populous central Mali and are still active today.
An army colonel who later participated in a second coup and took office as president in June 2021 overthrew Mali’s president in an uprising in August 2020. He formed connections with the Russian military and the Wagner Group of mercenaries, whose leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, perished in an aircraft crash last week while flying from Moscow.
Three parties—the government, a pro-government militia, and a coalition of groups calling for autonomy in the country’s north—signed the peace accord in Mali in 2015.
In the report released on Friday, the UN panel of experts claimed that the agreement’s implementation impasse, particularly the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of combatants into society, is enabling Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, which has ties to al-Qaeda, to compete for power in northern Mali.
The panel noted that ISIL already controls a sizable portion of the Ansongo region in northern Gao as well as rural areas in eastern Menaka, doubling its areas of control in Mali in less than a year.
The signatories to the peace agreement “appear to be weak and unreliable security providers” for the towns targeted, the UN experts said, due to the region’s ongoing bloodshed and attacks, which are primarily carried out by ISIL terrorists.
The panellists claimed that JNIM is making use of this weakness “and is now positioning itself as the sole actor capable of protecting populations against Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.”
They also out that Mali’s military leadership are remotely monitoring the conflict between ISIL and JNIM.
According to some of the sources mentioned by the experts, the government believes that the conflict in the north will eventually be advantageous for Malian authorities, but other sources claim that time is on the side of the armed groups, “whose military capacities and community penetration grow each day.”
After a decade of battling the insurgency, Mali’s military leaders issued an order in June for the 15,000 foreign soldiers and the UN peacekeeping mission to withdraw. On June 30, the UN Security Council revoked the mission’s authorization.
The 2015 agreement’s signatories, according to the panel, expressed fear that it might fall apart without UN intervention, “exposing the northern regions to the risk of another uprising.”
According to the panel, the UN force, also known as MINUSMA (Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali), “played a crucial role” in mediating negotiations between the parties, overseeing and documenting the execution of the agreement, and looking into potential violations.
The 104-page study portrayed a bleak picture of additional unrest and wrongdoing in the nation.
The panel claimed that transnational organised criminal networks and armed groups that signed the 2015 accord are vying for control of trade and trafficking routes that pass through the northern areas of Gao and Kidal.
The experts stated that “Mali remains a hotspot for drug trafficking in West Africa and between coastal countries in the Gulf of Guinea and North Africa, in both directions,” adding that many of the major drug dealers are reportedly situated in the country’s capital Bamako.
The Wagner Group is one of the foreign security partners of the Malian Armed Force, and the panel stated that the Wagner Group’s involvement in ongoing sexual violence related to war in the eastern Menaka and central Mopti districts is of particular concern.
The report stated that the panel “believes that foreign security partners are specifically using violence against women and other grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law to spread terror among populations.”
UN working to remove troops by year’s end from peacekeepers in Mali
SOURCE: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
