Eleven-year-old Amy raises her left arm to show where a bullet grazed her side, and from deep within her, a boundless distress comes out in great sobs. The girl’s life was plunged into hell on Saturday when gun- and machete-toting men entered her village in central Mali, set to kill everyone from her community, the Fulani. “Our fear here is that they will come back and kill all those who didn’t die. We are really afraid,” the child says. Amy says she lost several members of her family in the massacre at Ogassogou, a village in the Bankass district near the border with Burkina Faso. The bloodletting has been blamed on a militia from the Dogon ethnic group — a farming and hunting community that has long been at loggerheads with the cattle-grazing Fulani over access to the land. It is the latest spiral of violence in the ethnic mosaic of central Mali, where ancient tensions have boiled over — stoked, say experts, by the arrival of violent jihadist groups. Mass grave Homes in the village have been put to the torch, and rotting animal carcasses litter the ground. The stench fills the air. Near a well stands a mound of sand that witnesses described as a mass grave holding about 40 of the estimated 160 people who were murdered. “We hauled four bodies out of this well, including that of a child aged just seven years old,” a health worker said. On the ground were pieces of the Real Madrid football jersey that the child had worn. “We heard gunfire” at around 5 am, said cattle farmer Boubar Toure. “The attackers went directly to the home of the village chief,” added Hamadou Belco Barry. Barry said they murdered the village chief in front of his mother, whom they then killed. They then attacked other members of his family, he said.