Mauritania threw combat aircraft yesterday into a battle in northern Mali against militants loyal to Al-Qaeda, an Algerian security source said amid reports that its troops had suffered a setback.
“The Mauritanians have engaged at least two combat aircraft with the aim of gaining the upper hand, which they have not had so far,” the source said.
A local resident, Hamine Ould Mohamed Aly, told AFP that he had seen two planes fly over near the scene of the fighting at Raz-El-Ma, 235 kilometres west of Timbuktu in northern Mali.
Speaking by satellite telephone, he also said he had seen six burned-out Mauritanian army vehicles beside a well.
Earlier a senior Mauritanian officer said, “Our army has killed 12 armed terrorists and wounded dozens” in the cross-border fighting that began on Friday with militants of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
“We have five dead in our own ranks and nine wounded, most of them lightly,” he added.
An Algerian security official in the region spoke, however, of “very many casualties” on the Mauritanian side, including “at least 15” killed.
“The Islamists lost at least five people and others were wounded,” the Algerian official said, adding they had captured five or more Mauritanian vehicles.
A local representative in northern Mali also told AFP that nomadic tribesmen in the region reported “many” Mauritanian soldiers dead. He speculated that AQIM had drawn Mauritania into a trap. France meanwhile denied the raid was linked to last Thursday’s abductions of seven foreign uranium workers in northern Niger, who were reported later by security sources to have been taken across the border to northern Mali.
“There are no French forces in the field,” a foreign ministry spokesman in Paris said, adding that the fighting was “independent” of the kidnapping.
A joint offensive by French and Mauritanian troops in the region two months ago was aimed at freeing a French hostage seized in Niger.
That raid killed seven AQIM members but failed to free hostage Michel Germaneau, and three days later the militant group said it had executed the 78-year-old in retaliation.
Last Thursday gunmen seized an employee of the French nuclear group Areva and his wife, both French, and five others, including a Togolese and a Madagascan, from Satom, a subsidiary of construction giant Vinci.