Russia’s Wagner squad captured by Mali Jihadists

A jihadist organisation in Mali claims to have arrested a member of the Wagner mercenary squad, which is tied to the Kremlin and is apparently battling Islamist militants in the west African country.

“We arrested a soldier of the Russian Wagner troops in the Segou district of central Mali in the first week of April,” the GSIM (Group to Support Islam and Muslims) stated in a statement to AFP overnight.

The GSIM, an al-Qaida-linked organisation and the largest jihadist network in the Sahel, has reported the capture of a Wagner group fighter for the first time.

Russian paramilitaries in Mali, according to the US, France, and others, are operators from the private security business Wagner, which has previously been accused of human rights violations in the Central African Republic.

The charges have been refuted by Mali’s military-dominated administration, which claims the Russians in the nation are military instructors.

“These bloodthirsty soldiers engaged in an airdrop operation on a market in the village of Moura, where they battled many mujahideen before surrounding this region for five days and slaughtering hundreds of innocent civilians,” according to the GSIM statement.

The jihadist organisation said that Russian mercenaries carried out two parachute operations in central Mali, and that its fighters had taken weapons “from the mercenaries who fled.”

Due to the deadly conflict, which began in 2012 and expanded to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, large swaths of Mali are out of government control.

After a decade-long war against Islamists, France, which intervened in Mali in 2013, decided in February to remove its military from the nation.

A military junta, which seized power in a coup in 2020, governs the Sahel region.

The junta first vowed to restore civilian governance, but when it failed to hold elections in February this year as promised to the west African organisation Ecowas, regional sanctions were imposed.

The military-dominated administration in Bamako claimed last month that it had “neutralised” 203 militants in the central town of Moura, but witnesses questioned by the media and Human Rights Watch said that hundreds of civilians were slain.

The UN’s Minusma force has been begging Malian officials for permission to visit Moura to investigate the incidents.

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