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| Africa: North |
| 13 dead in ethnic clash in Mali |
| 2004-09-11 |
| At least 13 people have been killed in clashes and several others injured in a remote desert region of northern Mali after a resurgence of violence between two rival ethnic groups, police sources said on Friday. Mali's huge swathes of thinly populated savannah and desert have long been seen as a hotbed of banditry and rebellion. The United States fears that Islamic militants could be recruiting new supporters in the thinly policed region. Members of the Kounta ethnic group clashed with Arab militants in the settlement of Imelacht in the Sahara desert on Monday, after 16 members of both groups escaped from prison in the nearby town of Gao, the police sources told Reuters. The region around Gao was the scene of frequent clashes between members of the pro-government Kounta and pro-opposition Arab militants in the late 1990s as they fought for control of desert trading routes. Ethnic rivalry has simmered in the impoverished region ever since, but the latest clashes are the most violent between the two groups to have been reported since then. The men who escaped from prison had been detained for their involvement in sporadic fighting that started during local elections in June 1998 and led to the intervention of the military, the sources said. They had been widely expected to be pardoned. Mali's fair-skinned Tuareg nomads staged a revolt in 1990, saying they were persecuted by a black elite. Mali's army has clashed this year with members of Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a group linked to al Qaeda and classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States. Mali withdrew soldiers from many northern outposts in the late 1990s under the peace deal ending the Tuareg rebellion, but President Amadou Toumani Toure said in June he would send some soldiers back to ward off Islamic militants and combat banditry. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |