TIMBUKTU: Insecurity in Mali “continues to rage” and is progressing toward the center of the country, according to an interim UN report.
Members of Plateforme, an armed pro-government coalition, and the CMA rebel alliance, who were signatories to a 2015 peace deal, are seeing “progressive decline of their influence in areas traditionally under their indirect or direct control,” said the report which was to the Security Council and seen by AFP on Friday.
“Such loss of territorial control, adding to the increasing fragmentation of armed groups along ethnic lines and the subsequent multiplication of non-signatory armed groups, represent currently the main threat to the implementation of the agreement,” it said, referencing the peace deal brokered in Algeria in 2015. The report’s authors added that drug, human and arms trafficking remain rife in Mali, and despite the 2015 deal, “the humanitarian situation in the north and center of the country remains volatile, unstable and a marked deterioration persists.” “Across the country an estimated 4.1 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance,” they said.
Published in Daily Times, March 4th 2018.