Mali: UN investigation sheds light on Moura massacre when over 500 people were killed and tortured in five days of military operations

ROME – On 27 March 2022, Malian soldiers and some members of foreign groups reached Moura, a village in central Mali, by helicopter and opened fire on citizens at the market. The same soldiers then carried out house-to-house searches for Al-Qaeda terrorists over the next four days and killed, tortured and raped hundreds of men and women.

What happened in those days. the report of theUnited Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) details the five days of roundups in Moura. The operation – described by the authorities as a counter-terrorism action against an al-Qaeda-affiliated group known as Katiba Macina – began on March 27, 2022, during the weekly market day in Moura. According to witnesses, a military helicopter flying over the village opened fire on the people, while four other helicopters landed to disembark troops. Soldiers surrounded people in the center of the village and randomly shot those who tried to escape. Some Katiba Macina militants in the crowd returned fire. At least twenty civilians and a dozen suspected members of the terrorist organization were killed. Over the next four days, five hundred people were summarily executed, the dossier says. The UN team of investigators managed to identify 238 of these victims.

The roundups. Witnesses saw “armed white men” speaking an unknown language operating alongside Malian forces. While troops entered and exited Moura daily, foreign personnel remained throughout the operation. The day after the attack, the soldiers went house to house looking for “suspected terrorists”. They summarily executed people with unshaven beards, those wearing ankle-length pants, or those with marks on their shoulders. In the aggressors’ view, the marks on the shoulders were an indication of the habit of carrying weapons. Witnesses told the UN investigation team that a group of men who had been rounded up in the southeast of the village were taken away by soldiers and shot in the head, back or chest, and their bodies thrown into a ditch. And even those who resisted or tried to flee were executed by the Malian military and “white men with guns” and dumped in the ditch.

Sexual assaults. At least 58 women and girls were raped or subjected to other forms of sexual violence. According to the testimonies collected, the soldiers in one of the five days of military operations took away the bedding from a house, placed it under the trees in the garden and, in turn, raped the women they had brought there.

The tortures. Dozens of other people were arrested. Some of them were subjected to torture and other ill-treatment during interrogation and detention in Moura and at the National State Security Agency, Bamako. One of the victims said he was kicked, slapped and punched along with other detainees, while the military called them “jihadists” and accused them of killing their brothers and destroying their country. Another witness said he was tortured with electric shocks for a long time while he was being interrogated.

No investigation in Mali. In Bamako the authorities have repeatedly announced the opening of an investigation after the crimes committed in the five days of March 2022 in Moura, but more than a year has passed and not only have they not sought the criminals but they still firmly deny that their troops have committed crimes. For the UN, Moura’s five days are one of the worst atrocities committed in the ten-year conflict between the armed forces and Islamist groups that is scourged in Mali and has already caused thousands of deaths and millions of displaced people.

Who are the white men? Their identity is not clear, regional spokesman for the UN Human Rights Office, Seif Magango, told Reuters. But for the West it is plausible that they are the soldiers of the Russian Wagner Group, which has been operating in Mali since the end of 2021. Again Reuters quotes the Russian envoy of the United Nations in Bamako, Maria Molodtsova, who during a meeting last week in Geneva said those killed in Moura were al-Qaeda militants and that the military operation contributed to peace and tranquility. A Reuters investigation at the time of the killing reported testimony by some people who had heard the white men in military uniform speaking Russian.