Paris has stepped up to the plate after Bamako’s accusations. In a letter sent to the United Nations earlier this week, the Malian authorities accused France of collecting intelligence for the benefit of terrorist groups in the Sahel and of dropping arms and munitions to them. “France has obviously never directly or indirectly supported these terrorist groups,” the French embassy in Mali replied, looking back over the last nine years of the fight against terrorism.
On its Twitter account, the French embassy in Bamako posted on the evening of Wednesday 17 August a thread, i.e. a succession of messages in which it reviews the anti-terrorist mission in Mali.
It recalls that “France intervened in Mali between 2013 and 2022 at the request of the Malian authorities”. During this period, “France liberated many Malian cities that had fallen into the hands of terrorists, who imposed their reign of terror – ban on education, murders, corporal punishment -, especially in Timbuktu and Gao,” the embassy said.
In nine years,” the French diplomatic service continued, “Paris has neutralized several hundred terrorists in Mali and put two historic figures of terrorism in the region out of action”: the leader of the Islamic State group, Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahraoui, and the leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Abdelmalek Droukdel.
In all the communiqués of the terrorist groups,” the embassy said, “France was until its departure designated as their number one enemy.
“53 French soldiers […] whose mission was, above all, to fight against terrorist groups” died in Mali, insists the @FranceauMali account on Twitter, adding that “in recent years, France has been bruised on its own territory by several terrorist attacks.
In a final message, the French embassy in Bamako responded to accusations made by the Malian foreign ministry, which claimed that France had “collected intelligence for the benefit of terrorist groups” in order to “drop arms and ammunition”. “France has obviously never supported, directly or indirectly, these terrorist groups, which remain its designated enemies throughout the world,” the embassy said.