This year, Wagner’s mercenaries were spread across the central and northern states of Mali in West Africa, along with Malian forces. Russian fighters have been involved in at least six alleged massacres since March, prompting tens of thousands of people to flee across the border into Mauritania, the Wall Street Journal said, citing survivors, Western officials, UN officials and human rights groups. Is. From the terror they create.
In a report to journalists Benoît Foucan and Joe Parkinson, this newspaper says that the Mauritanians were also arrested during the attack by the Mali armed forces with the cooperation of Wagner group mercenaries.
Russia donates military equipment and weapons to the leaders of the Military Council, the most recent of which arrived in Mali via Bamako airport earlier this month.
Russia has provided Russian fighter jets and helicopters to the country, which has been fighting fundamentalist militias for more than a decade.
What did not appear at the handover ceremony, which was broadcast on local television, was the burgeoning base of the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-linked military firm that has sent some 1,000 mercenaries to Mali in exchange for cash and the possibility of lucrative mining concessions. .
He leads Mali’s military junta after a 2020 coup, and shortly after the ceremony, the country’s military president, Colonel Assi Guta, received a phone call from Vladimir Putin.
UN investigators said in an unpublished report seen by the Wall Street Journal that a joint force of Mali and “white” fighters raided a group of herders near the Mauritanian border and executed dozens of them.
Survivors told the newspaper in interviews that while the incident occurred as part of an operation against militants, there was no fighting and the shepherds were not armed.
Western security officials told the newspaper that Wagner had sent geologists to explore resource-rich areas in southwestern and central Mali before deploying his mercenaries, adding that the timing suggested Wagner would use military force to evict residents. in which “Jihadists” operate. The company can access them.
“Mali is the link between a country with important natural resources and a weak government, where Russia can provide services to the government and access it,” said Anna Burshevskaya, a Russia researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. [إلى الموارد] by Wagner
Neither Wagner nor the Kremlin responded to the newspaper’s requests for comment, and neither did the Military Council, the Armed Forces and the Ministry of Finance. “We don’t know anything about Wagner,” Mali’s foreign minister Abdullah Diop told the UN Security Council in June.
Mali is one of a growing list of African countries where the ousted Putin is seeking to tap a network of allies outside the government to provide power and raise revenue.
According to the newspaper, the Wagner group now operates in Mali, Syria, Sudan and the Central African Republic, with about 5,000 men stationed on the continent.
The company is run by Yevgeny Pruzin, known as Putin’s chef for his food processing deals with the Kremlin, and according to the US government, Wagner has become Russia’s main tool of influence and alternative income in far-flung conflict zones. The Council of the European Union, both of which have sanctioned this company.
The Kremlin says it has nothing to do with Wagner, but Russian state media have been flooded with press reports in recent months about the company’s “heroic abuses in Ukraine,” according to the newspaper.
The newspaper said the company provides strong military aid to Kremlin allies without formally involving the Kremlin.
Gleb Irisov, a former signals officer in the Russian Air Force who defected to the West, told the newspaper as well as Western security officials that Wagner’s mercenaries regularly traveled on Russian military planes in Africa.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, Wagner has quietly grown into a much larger network of mining and political consultants that provide gold mining services, political campaign advice and disinformation in provide social media.
Western and African officials say Mozambique hired the company in 2019 to crack down on an IS affiliate, but was forced to withdraw after many of its fighters were captured and beheaded.
Mozambique canceled the contract of this team. In Mauritania, civil organizations protested the killing of the country’s citizens by this company across the border.
The stakes are particularly high in Mali, a mineral-rich country the size of California, Texas and Montana, which has been wracked by conflicts with ethnic Tuareg rebels and, more recently, violent fundamentalist groups.
A year after a pro-Russian military faction seized power in 2021, the French began withdrawing 1,000 troops. Soon, financial and Washington relations cooled.
In April, the US State Department rejected the military’s request to import a military-grade transceiver for the single C-295 turboprop aircraft carrier “due to foreign policy concerns,” according to documents seen by the newspaper.
Western security officials and the United Nations say Wagner signed a contract with the military council in December 2021 in which he agreed to pay $10 million a month to help fight Islamist extremists.
According to the newspaper, it soon became clear that he had other financial ambitions than receiving a monthly stipend for his mercenary fighters.
Mali is the fourth largest exporter of gold in Africa. According to the US Department of Commerce and the US Geological Survey, Mali also has large reserves of oil, manganese, uranium and lithium, a mineral used to make batteries for electric cars.
According to Tuareg leader and former finance minister Hama Ag Mahmoud, the government is negotiating with Wagner over two gold mining concessions in southern Mali.
Another Tuareg leader and Western security officials said this summer Wagner’s forces moved near Intahaca in the northeast, the site of a giant informal gold mine operated by villagers.
The Mali army and local rebel groups had arranged to let villagers work in the mine in exchange for a percentage of production, the people said.
They said Wagner had entered into the deal, which could give the Russian firm access to a stake in the region’s gold revenue stream.
Western officials said Sudanese traders, who had long dominated trade across Mali, left the country as a result of the military operation, replaced by Russians who sell gold through middlemen in Dubai.
According to survivors, Western security officials and human rights activists, Mali’s Wagner group carried out an operation in the central Mali city of Mora in March that killed 500 people.
The Malian government says it has killed 203 al-Qaida-linked terrorists in Mora, saying they likely died of gunshot wounds.
Source: Lebanon Debate
