Tuareg rebels from a new group that has reneged on a peace accord with Mali’s government kidnapped 15 soldiers from an eastern town and fled in the direction of Niger, Malian security officials said on Monday.
The soldiers snatched in Tedjerete on Sunday were among troops posted in the northern part of Mali’s border area to protect agro-science technicians working to prevent a locust infestation in the sub-Saharan region, the army said.
”Fifteen of our forces have been kidnapped and taken hostage by armed men in Tedjerete. With their abductors they took the direction of the Niger border,” a senior army officer serving in the region said, asking not to be named.
Several security sources said Tuareg leader Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, who comes from Mali but has taken refuge among militants of the desert people still fighting in Niger, was behind the kidnapping.
”This was Ibrahim Ag Bahanga’s work,” a local military source said. ”We know. Those were his methods and the day it happened, witnesses really saw him. Now you see him, now you don’t; this is his doing.”
The dissident leader, whose father-in-law, Hama Ag Sidahmed, has also broken with other former rebels and formed alliances in Niger, is said to have carried out a May 11 attack on an army post that killed 10 soldiers.
Security sources say he then crossed the border to shelter with Niger’s Tuareg rebel Nigerian Movement for Justice (MNJ).
Other former rebels in Mali, who have formed the Democratic Alliance of May 23 2006 for Change, denied any part in the ”armed rebellion”.
The name of that movement refers to a period when Mali’s Tuaregs took up arms to attack several military camps in the north, but three months later signed a peace deal with the Bamako government.
Under the agreements mediated by northern neighbour Algeria, the government made commitments to work for the development of the desert regions inhabited by Tuaregs, an indigenous Berber people who for centuries led a nomadic existence in the Sahara and what are today the independent nations of North and Sahel Africa.
About 12 gunmen were involved in the attack, initially grabbing 23 soldiers before releasing eight as they made their escape.
In Bamako, also on Sunday, Mali’s Foreign Ministry announced a summit of heads of state in the Sahel nations on the southern edges of the Sahara. A ministry statement said the summit will take place in the near future as a joint initiative between Mali and Libya and cover the Tuareg uprisings and cross-border security issues, including arms and drugs trafficking.
On August 22, the security ministers of Mali and Niger, Sadio Gassama and Albade Abouba, met at Gao in north Mali and agreed that joint military border patrols will be formed and authorised the cross-border pursuit of rebels.
Clashes broke out in northern Niger this year between the army and rebels demanding better representation of Tuaregs in the armed forces and in the uranium mining sector.
In Mali, Bahanga’s father-in-law, Hama Ag Sidahmed, last week announced the formation of a Niger-Mali Tuareg Alliance, stating that the Tuaregs of both countries have ”common aims and demands”. — Sapa-AFP