| Soldiers from the Waraba Battalion, an EU-trained Malian army battalion, walk outside their base in Gao July 8, 2013. |
Malian soldiers staged their first joint patrol on Thursday with members of rival armed groups in the town of Gao where Islamist militants killed more than 77 people last month in the deadliest such attack in the country’s history.
The long-awaited patrol is part of an initiative aimed at easing local tensions so that government forces can focus on fighting the militants. More such patrols are due over the next few weeks under the terms of a 2015 U.N.-brokered peace deal.
Hundreds of soldiers from Mali’s army, France’s operation Barkhane, the U.N. peacekeeping mission, the Tuareg separatist Coordination of Azawad Movements and pro-government militias took part in the patrol, a Reuters witness said.
They moved through the town on foot and in pick-up trucks, starting at around 9.45 a.m. local time (0945 GMT) on a roughly 7-km (4-mile) route and met no resistance, the witness said.
The Jan. 18 attack in Gao claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb shows the difficulty faced by the government and international peacekeepers in combating militant Islamist groups, some with links to al Qaeda, based in the desert north.
Gao is a town of 50,000 people on the banks of the
Niger river, where the offices of the 13,000-strong U.N. mission in Mali, MINUSMA, were flattened by a truck bomb in December.
A French-led military intervention in 2013 pushed insurgent groups back from northern Mali – a vast desert area they had taken the year before – but Islamist militants still conduct frequent attacks there.