Russian Troops Blunder in Mali while helping hunt Terrorists in Africa

"Malian troops and suspected Russian fighters allegedly executed around 300 civilian men over five days during a military operation in a central Malian town in late March, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report on Tuesday. FRANCE 24 terrorism expert Wassim Nasr gives his analysis, saying that this was a counter-jihadist operation sparked by bad intelligence. 

The alleged killings took place between March 27 and 31 in the town of Moura, a rural town of around 10,000 inhabitants in central Mali’s Mopti region, a hotspot of extremist activity that has intensified and spread to neighbouring countries in the Sahel region. Since many weeks the Malian military – helped with Russian elements – is trying to make a kind of surge in the central region of Mali.

The Malian army "based their operation there on bad information – or bad intelligence", Nasr explained. “I got to know that a member of the first circle of Mohamad Koufa, a prominent leader of al Qaeda there, was caught and brought into interrogation in [the Malian capital] Bamako – and actually this person gave some information, saying that Koufa could be in this region of Moura, which launched this operation with at least 100 Russian operatives backing the Malian army." France24