Bamako – A Malian pro-government militia has killed eight Islamist fighters in a gun battle in northern Mali.
Security sources in Mali on Monday confirmed the killings during clashes between the militia and the Macina Liberation Front which erupted on Saturday in Gourma-Rharous village.
They said although they had no details of how the clashes started in the Timbuktu region, but the region had long been plagued by Islamist militants.
A source said on condition of anonymity that Mali’s government and various separatist groups signed a peace deal last year but had failed to prevent periodic violence in northern Mali by Islamist militants.
The source said the militants had also staged assaults on high profile targets in Bamako, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast.
He said Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General, had asked the Security Council to add just over 2,500 peacekeepers to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), has claimed an attack on two UN sites in northern Mali at the end of last month, in which a peacekeeper from China and three civilians were killed and over a dozen others wounded.
French forces intervened in 2013 to drive back Islamist fighters that had hijacked the Tuareg uprising to seize Mali’s desert north in 2012.
This has since proved difficult to prevent Islamists from staging deadly attacks. (Reuters/NAN)
