Malian militants have killed 84 Wagner Group mercenaries from Russia during fighting near the African country’s border with Algeria, according to reports.
Separatist fighters in Mali claim that they also took out 47 Malian soldiers after violent clashes near Tinzaouatene, northeast Mali.
They added that 30 people, dead or injured, were airlifted to the town of Kidal and that charred bodies were left in armoured vehicles.
The Malian military has said that it has suffered “a significant number” of deaths.
Definitive figures for the number of losses on all sides of the fighting have not been released.
The separatist fighters are an alliance of groups from the Tuareg population, a nomadic community living in areas spanning from far southwestern Libya to southern Algeria, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and as far as northern Nigeria.
The group also claims to have taken seven prisoners from the Wagner Group, as well as five armoured vehicles, five pickup trucks, and weapons.
The separatists are affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
Ukraine‘s military claimed this week that it helped the ambush that dealt big losses to Wagner.
Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, said that “the rebels received the necessary information, and not just information, which enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals”.
Serhii Kuzan, director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center in Kyiv, explained why Wagner is so active in Mali.
He told The Guardian: “For Moscow, the African countries where Wagner is present is just a zone of interest that allows it to get hold of resources – gold, diamonds, gas and oil – and the money goes to finance Russian aggression.
“A significant part of the destroyed fighters got military experience in Ukraine, where they carried out hundreds or thousands of war crimes… these crimes should be punished, and Russian war criminals should know that they will never be safe.”
The Wagner Group was founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former ally of Putin who mysteriously died in a plane crash after launching a mutiny against the Russian President in 2023.