According to multiple sources in the peacekeeping effort, U.N. soldiers abandoned a camp on Tuesday in the vital town of Kidal in Mali’s unstable north, which has been rocked by violence from jihadists and separatists.
“We left Kidal this morning,” an official from the town’s U.N. peacekeeping force stated.
The peacekeepers were ordered to leave Mali in June 2020 by the country’s new military rulers, who declared the operation a “failure” after a coup.
One hundred and eighty of the 15,000 or so soldiers and police personnel that have made up the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) have lost their lives.
READ ALSO: House of Representatives calls for Tinubu to promptly reopen the northern borders
While the UN troops started to leave their compounds as early as July, the initial plan was for the peacekeeping force to leave the country of West Africa by the end of the year.
According to the U.N. peacekeeping force, in compliance with UN regulations, it was forced to destroy or decommission vehicles, ammunition, and generators that it was unable to remove.
Enmity between the Malian state and armed groups located in the country’s north has intensified as a result of the MINUSMA pullout.
These organisations argue that returning the UN camps to the Malian army would violate the ceasefire and peace agreements reached with Bamako in 2014 and 2015.
But the army is making an effort to retake command of the camps that were evacuated.
The army is being opposed by separatist factions, most of whom are Tuareg, and hostilities have returned.
The Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM), which has ties to Al-Qaeda, has also increased its attacks on the armed forces.
these makes MINUSMA’s pull-out all the more dangerous because it is happening in the midst of these renewed hostilities as well as what are thought to be government constraints on the organization’s freedom of movement.
