New terror group emerges in Mali conflict

BAMAKO/SEVARE: Imam Elhadji Sekou Ba was one of the few people in his village of Barkerou who dared to speak out against the rise of Islamist militants in central Mali, denouncing in his sermons the young men taking up arms in the name of religion.

Last Thursday, shortly after dinner, he was gunned down on his doorstep.

Locals suspect the killing was carried out by the Massina Liberation Front (MLF), a new group blamed for a wave of attacks that is shifting Mali’s three-year-old Islamist conflict from the remote desert north ever closer to its populous south.

The emergence of the new group, recruiting among central Mali’s marginalised Fulani ethnic minority, has sown panic among residents, forced some officials to flee, and undermined the efforts of a 10 000strong UN peacekeeping mission to stabilise the West African state.

Inspired by veteran jihadist Amadou Koufa, a radical preacher from the central Malian town of Mopti, the MLF has introduced a volatile new ethnic element to the Islamist conflict in a nation riddled with tribal tensions. Security experts fear that the rise of a jihadist group among the Fulani – whose 20 million members are spread across West and Central Africa – could regionalise the violence.

“The risk is that links develop between Fulanis throughout the region and it could be the next major regional conflict,” said Aurelien Tobie, a conflict adviser formerly based in the Malian capital Bamako.

“Everywhere Fulanis are marginalised, they have a strong identity and there are connections between them.”

The assassination was the latest in a wave of killings in the Mopti region targeting those opposed to Mali’s array of Islamist groups. Many of the militants come from the ranks of jihadist fighters that seized the northern two-thirds of Mali in 2012 alongside Tuareg rebels.

During the Islamist occupation of northern Mali, Mopti was the last bastion of government power before the lawless desert. That image was destroyed this month when armed men attacked a hotel in nearby Sevare and killed at least 12 people. – Reuters