Two different sets of assailants struck the ethnic Dogon villages of Gorey, Simikanda and Djamnati in Mali's Mopti region, which has been ravaged in recent years by Islamist and inter-ethnic violence, the officials said.
Moulaye Guindo, the mayor of Bankass, which is near Gorey and Simikanda, blamed the attacks on the same gunnies who killed eight people in attacks on a Malian military post and a gendarme base last Thursday.
Islamist groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
regularly attack Malian security forces, UN peacekeepers and civilians in the area, and they have stoked ethnic conflict between farming communities like the Dogon and Fulani
... a peculiarly brutal tribe of Moslem herdsmen infesting Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and probably other places that are light on law and order and heavy on tribal identity...herders.
Guindo and Yacouba Kassogué, the deputy mayor of Doucoumbo, which is near Djamnati, said four people were killed in Gorey, four in Djamnati and one in Simikanda.
'They attacked, set fires and stole cattle,' Kassogué told Rooters.
Mali has been in crisis since Islamist gunnies seized its desert north in 2012, forcing La Belle France to intervene the following year to push them back. But they have regrouped and extended their operations into central Mali and neighbouring countries in West Africa's Sahel region
... North Africa's answer to the Pak tribal areas...