APA – Bamako (Mali) – The German army said that the executed operative worked for one of its subcontractors and was not one of its local employees.
Two images were published by the Sahel branch of the Islamic State. One of the images shows a man – presumably the victim – sitting blindfolded at the edge of a pit. Behind him are several men armed with assault rifles. This was probably before his execution. The second image shows the smiling victim next to a German army soldier at Camp Castor, the German armed forces base of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in Gao.
Written under the images is the claim that he was a “Malian who was murdered because he was working as a spy for the German army crusaders.”
Sources have confirmed that the victim disappeared last July, between the towns of Gao and Ansongo, just over 90 km apart. On this stretch of the ‘Route Nationale’ 17 (Highway17), jihadists carry out sometimes deadly attacks.
According to the same sources, he was executed on 17 August.
A few days before the publication of these images, on 20 August, a spokesman for the operational command of the Bunderswehr (the German armed forces) declared in a German media outlet that “according to current knowledge, local employees in Mali are not subject to any individual or systematic danger as such as a result of their work with our forces.”
This assertion has been discredited by these propaganda images.
For some time, many observers have feared that, following the withdrawal of the international forces from the MINUSMA scheduled for before the end of this year, local employees or other collaborators would be targeted. This is a situation that has been observed in Afghanistan in particular since the departure of the US-led international military coalition two years ago.
The German army has indicated that it employs at least sixty local staff. These include around twenty translators and interpreters, some of whom carry out dangerous patrols alongside German soldiers and establish contacts with the Malian population. However, other sources claim that the number of local employees of the German army is higher. In addition to Malians, sources also report the presence of other nationalities working indirectly for the Bunderswehr.
At Camp Castor in Gao, occupied by German peacekeepers, there are various private subcontractors working in areas such as laundry and waste disposal. The employees of these subcontractors are not treated in the same way as local staff. The victim executed by the jihadists could therefore have been an employee of one of these subcontracting companies, as the German army spokesman states. One of these companies is “Ecolog,” a multinational based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which operates in various fields such as catering, energy, construction, facilities management and the environment.
This news comes at a time when the security situation in various parts of the country is marked by an upsurge in attacks, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes. The number of internally displaced people in Mali is estimated at almost 400,000, the overwhelming majority of whom cite insecurity as the main reason for their displacement. In addition to the Islamic State in the Sahel (EIS), the ‘Groupe de Soutien à l’Islam et aux Musulmans’ (GSIM), affiliated to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is also active.
According to many experts, the Sahelian zone, in which Mali is located, has now replaced the Middle East as the most important area of operations for Islamist terrorism. In its latest 2023 report, the Global Terrorism Index revealed that with 22,074 people killed in 6,408 terrorist attacks between 2007 and 2022, the number of victims of terrorist attacks in the Sahel region has increased by more than 2,000% over the past 15 years. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are among the top ten countries in this ranking.
With a thousand peacekeepers, the German army has been participating in the MINUSMA for a decade. However, despite the deployment of more than 10,000 peacekeepers, this mission has failed to curb the violence of jihadist groups, which has subsequently spread to other neighboring countries such as Burkina Faso and Niger. It even reached the Gulf of Guinea states. As a result, on 16 June, the Malian transitional authorities called for the withdrawal of MINUSMA, which had been underway since 1 July and was due to end on 31 December at the latest. The German army, which had planned to remain in Mali until March 2024 to follow the transition process through to its conclusion, is due to leave prematurely, before the end of this year.
Long before the “Kevin” case, many local workers, fearing to find themselves without protection after the departure of the international forces, sounded the alarm without any response yet being given to them. For some, failure to take their case into account could jeopardise local cooperation with future German army missions.
MD/ac/fss/as/APA