Two elected officials told AFP that armed men on Sunday stormed two military bases in northern Mali, with a spokesman for an alliance of primarily Tuareg armed groups claiming responsibility for the attack.
On social media, the Mali military announced that Lere, in the northern Timbuktu Region, had been attacked on Sunday.
A military spokesman in Mali told AFP that the country was “handling the situation.”
“Armed men attacked the two (military) camps in the town of Lere on Sunday,” a municipal official told AFP.
“After a struggle, the armed men captured the encampment. As of right now, the camps are being held by armed guys while we wait for army reinforcements, he continued.
A representative of the administrative region added that armed men had stormed the two camps and were still holding them.
He could not give a number of deaths, only that there had been some.
Speaking on behalf of a coalition of armed, Tuareg-dominated separatist factions known as the Coordination of Azawad Movements, Almou Ag Mohamed claimed responsibility for the assault.
On Sunday, he claimed, “We attacked and took control of the two military camps in the town of Lere.” “We are in charge of the camps. An army plane was shot down by us.
Reborn rebellion
According to officials, the attackers have not yet been formally recognised.
The successionist organisations started a rebellion in 2012, and in 2015, they signed a peace accord with the government. However, it’s now commonly accepted that the agreement is dead.
The gangs’ hostilities have resumed in this month.
The groups attacked army posts in the garrison town of Bourem on Tuesday, but the military claimed to have repulsed their attack.
Although the two sides gave conflicting accounts of what happened, they both listed scores of deaths.
Separatists’ resurgence in military activities has coincided with a slew of attacks, mostly blamed on the al-Qaida-affiliated jihadist group Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM).
The Timbuktu region is now at war, according to GSIM’s announcement from August.
In a different incident on Sunday, the intelligence services reported that two troops were killed and one was injured in an ambush close to the hamlet of Akor in western Mali.
It stated that the attack occurred while a supply team was returning from the town of Guire and that four attackers had also been slain.
Assimi Goita, the head of the junta, and his counterparts from Niger and Burkina Faso signed a mutual defence pact on Saturday. The agreement established a military alliance and pledged the parties’ support for one another in the case of an attack on their territorial integrity or sovereignty.
