Mali's Genocide

In August 2023, the French forces and UN peacekeepers withdrew from Mali on the orders of the military junta. On 2 October, a 100-vehicle military column carrying Malian soldiers and their Russian Wagner group allies, set out from Gao. Their official task was to restore terretorial integrity and fight ‘terrorists’ in northern Mali. In practice, their order from the junta’s leader, Assimi Goïta, was “to kill all white-skinned inhabitants” in the Kidal region, which meant Tuaregs and Arabs, and to destroy their homes, and means of livelihood.

After summarizing the background history of conflict between Mali’s Tuareg and the Mali state, the Report documents the murderous record of the genocide, or what local Tuareg called an “ethnocide”, as the soldiers and their Russian allies carried Goïta’s order. The massacres, involving disembowelment, beheading, the impalement of severed heads and cannibalism, defied the imagination. Tuareg fighters finally managed to defeat the murderous column, killing some 84 Russians and several dozen Malian soldiers, only for Assimi Goïta to respond with a drone-based missile attack that killed almost the entire Tuareg leadership. With the death toll mounting, the world and its mainstream media, preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, Gaza’s genocide, Sudan and President Trump’s gangster politics, remained silent.