Six youths killed in French raid in Mali

Bamako: Six young men were killed in northeastern Mali on Thursday in an airstrike launched by the French Barkhane force, which confirmed it was targeting jihadists, while local notables said the dead were just ordinary young men, most of them they minors, who were at liberty. hunting game when they were killed.

This is the second time in a few months that a French airstrike has resulted in fatalities. The French army claims they are jihadists, while local notables say they are civilians.

Mohamed Al-Saleh Ahmed, mayor of Talatayi, located between the cities of Gao and Menaka, told AFP that the dead were six young people from the village who died in an airstrike on Thursday and were buried the same day.

“They were a group of young people, including minors, who decided to spend the day outside of Talatay on three motorcycles, armed with a hunting rifle, to shoot rabbits and partridges,” he added.

The mayor said that four of the dead were under 16 and the rest were 18 and 20 years old.

“Around 10:30, eyewitnesses reported explosions and confirmed that they saw planes in the air. It is impossible to know if they were French planes or not, “he added.

“Then, when the news spread in the town, it was decided to send people and a car to the site to recover the six bodies that were buried in the Talatay cemetery around 6:00 pm,” he said.

In turn, a member of the city council said he saw a drone firing a missile west of Talatay.

For their part, two of the town notables said that eyewitnesses had informed them of an air strike.

The three notables confirmed that the dead were fishermen on motorcycles.

On the other hand, the French force Barkhane to combat the jihadists published a statement on Thursday night in which it gave a completely different account of what appeared to be the same event, as the statement spoke of carrying out an air strike. at the same time and place, that is, around noon and 60 kilometers north of Indelemany.

Barkhan said in his statement that “after a phase of recognition and verification that allowed the identification of an armed terrorist group and its concentration, an air strike was launched to neutralize” this group.

The statement did not specify how many people were killed in the raid, saying only that it resulted in “the destruction of three motorcycles.”

Due to the difficulty of obtaining information in this remote and dangerous region, verifying the veracity of what is happening there is a daunting task.

An airstrike launched by Barkhane in Ponte (central Mali) in January raised questions about whether the French force made a serious mistake at the time.

At that time, residents and an association for the defense of the Fulani ethnic group reported that the air attack affected a wedding party and left about twenty civilians dead, while the French and financial authorities confirmed that French fighters raided a concentration of jihadists , killing dozens of civilians. them, and that there was no wedding at all.

The United Nations Mission in Mali conducted an investigation into that raid, but has not yet released its results.