Nearly 100 people were killed in a gruesome overnight attack on a village in central Mali, in the latest violence to strike the fragile region, authorities said Monday.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the massacre, targeting a village inhabited by the Dogon community, bore the hallmarks of tit-for-tat ethnic attacks that have claimed hundreds of lives.
It came less than three months after nearly 160 members of the Fulani ethnic group were slaughtered by a group identified as Dogon.
“This country cannot be led by a cycle of revenge, and vendetta,” Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita told ORTM public television from Switzerland, where he said he was cutting short an official visit.
He called on Malians to come together to “allow our nation to survive, because this is a question of survival.”
Local officials in Koundou district, where the Sobane-Kou village was attacked, told AFP 95 people were killed, their bodies burned and others were still missing.
The government, giving a provisional toll, said 95 people had been killed, 19 were missing, numerous farm animals had been slaughtered and homes had been torched.
A brutal cycle of violence in central Mali, an ethnic mosaic, began after a predominantly Fulani jihadist group led by preacher Amadou Koufa emerged in 2015.
Since jihadists recruited mainly from Fulanis, they became associated with them, fuelling tensions with other ethnic groups such as Bambara and Dogon. The Fulani are primarily cattle breeders and traders, while the Bambara and Dogon are traditionally sedentary farmers.
On May 16, the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali (MINUSMA) announced it had recorded “at least 488 deaths” in attacks on Fulanis in the central regions of Mopti and Segou since January 2018.
In the bloodiest raid, about 160 Fulani villagers were slaughtered on March 23 at Ogossagou, near the border with Burkina Faso, by suspected Dogon hunters.
According to MINUSMA, armed Fulanis had “caused 63 deaths” among civilians in the Mopti region, also since January 2018.
There are currently about 14,700 troops and police deployed in Mali, which ranks as the most dangerous UN mission, with 125 peacekeepers killed in attacks since deployment in 2013.
Donor countries to MINUSMA are to meet at the UN on Wednesday. A decision on renewing the force’s mandate is expected by June 27.
