‘We collected 180 bodies. We only recognised our friends by their clothes’
Accounts of atrocities by Russian mercenaries in Mali lay bare the seismic power shift in the Sahel
The Russian mercenary slowly went through the group of hundreds of prisoners with a stick. If a man’s beard was too long or his clothes too Islamic, he would get a tap on the head. “He is a jihadist. Kill him,” the man said in Russian.
When enough people were selected, they were marched to a nearby building and shot. There was nowhere to hide in the arid scrub around Moura village in Central Mali. The white men had come in on helicopters with government soldiers and translators. If the locals tried to run, they would be gunned down in seconds.
“They didn’t even take the time to tie their hands or blindfold them. They just executed them. Some even while they were still walking. One bullet and that was it,” said Muhammad – not his real name – a 29-year-old driver who was one of the prisoners that survived and witnessed the entire thing.
“They also executed a kid of about 10 years old. I don’t know what his name was or why they killed him.” After three days of sporadic executions in the beating sun at Moura, the Russians ordered survivors to dig mass graves to get rid of the appalling smell. “For hours, I picked up bloated bodies and threw them into the pit on the riverbank,” Muhammad told The Sunday Telegraph, still visibly shaken and disturbed. “We collected 180 bodies. The victims were bloated and deformed. We could only recognise our friends by their clothes.”
Anywhere from 200 to 600 men and boys are estimated to have been executed in that village in late March, according to rights groups. Mali’s military junta claims they were all terrorists involved in an earlier attack and has denied UN investigators access.
The massacre is part of a seismic shift in power on Europe’s southern flank, where Moscow is upending France’s, and by extension the West’s, military dominance in the Sahel with deadly consequences.
Paris, the old hegemon in this region that runs along the southern edge of the Sahara, announced this year it was withdrawing 5,000 troops after a decade of fighting a losing desert war against jihadist groups. Soon the only Western forces to remain in Mali will be a small contingent of German and British troops on the UN’s beleaguered peacekeeping mission.
Now Wagner Group guns-for-hire linked to the Kremlin are moving into recently vacated French bases in Mali, from the medieval city of Timbuktu to the remote desert town of Menaka.
“The Russians are resetting the region’s power dynamics. For the last 60 years, the French have convinced the US – and themselves – that they are indispensable in Francophone Africa. The Malians and Russians are testing that indispensability,” says Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.
Russia’s use of mercenaries in Africa is a tried and tested tactic to carve out a sphere of influence for Moscow in unstable countries and challenge Western goals. The Wagner group has run military operations in the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya and Mozambique.
By going through a mesh of private companies like Wagner – widely alleged to be owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman once known as “Putin’s chef ” – Moscow can claim plausible deniability. Mr Prigozhin has always denied any link to the group.
Ostensibly they are there to help the government as “instructors”. But since the Wagner group was invited into the West African country in December, there has been an explosion of reports of massacres and torture involving Russian soldiers.
At the village of Hombori, survivors told this newspaper that Russians shot indiscriminately into a livestock fair on April 19 with Kalashnikovs. They killed almost 20 people before rounding up another 60 into three trucks. It is believed many of these people were later tortured or executed.
“There were no jihadists. No men were armed. People fled in all directions,” says Ahmad – not his real name – a local merchant.
“They killed several dozen people. My older brother was caught in front of his store. It was white people, Russians… who arrested my brother.”
“Russia can offer something much narrower and more purely securityfocused [than France] which suits the perceptions and interests of certain Malian officials who think that extreme violence is needed to solve the problem in the centre of the country,” says Andrew Lebovich, a Sahel expert at the European Council of Foreign Relations.
Many of the Sahel’s problems can be traced back to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall in 2011. When Libya’s arsenals were looted, heavily armed rebels and allied jihadists swept out of the desert and conquered the northern half of Mali in 2012.
France scrambled troops and drove the militants out of major towns. For a while, President François Hollande basked in the victorious glow and was even presented with the unwieldy gift of a white camel in Timbuktu.
But every year the criminal gangs, ethnic militias and bands of jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda or Islamic State seemed to multiply. The conflict has now spread deep into Burkina Faso and Niger, killing tens of thousands of people and displaced millions.
In response, the region became the testing ground for a new EU integrated defence strategy, with everyone from Denmark to Lithuania piling in to fight what experts have increasingly dubbed the “forever war”.
As western interest – and success – has waned, Moscow has seen an opportunity to exploit the growing anger among many west Africans against their former French coloniser.
While some Wagner mercenaries were reportedly redeployed from Africa to Ukraine to try to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelensky, it’s estimated that Moscow has about 1,000 operatives in Mali.
Russia’s hand is clear to see in the atrocities being seen in Mali in recent months. But analysts argue that much of the blame also lies with the French and its western allies.
“A lot of this represents a very real failure of European policy,” adds Mr Lebovich.
‘They didn’t even take the time to tie their hands or blindfold them. They just executed them. One bullet and that was it’