At least 95 people have been killed in an overnight attack on an ethnic Dogon village in central Mali, local officials have said, in the latest bout of violence to hit the region.
Nineteen others were missing since unknown armed men attacked the village of Sobane-Kou in the Mopti region in the early hours of Monday, the government said in a statement.
“Armed men, suspected to be terrorists, launched a murderous attack on this peaceful village,” the statement added.
The attackers also killed animals and burned down houses, the government said, adding that an investigation was under way.
A Malian security source at the site of the massacre said, “A Dogon village has been virtually wiped out.”
A survivor who gave his name as Amadou Togo told the AFP news agency that “about 50 heavily armed men arrived on motorbikes and pickups.
“They first surrounded the village and then attacked – anyone who tried to escape was killed,” Togo said.
“Some people had their throats cut or were disemboweled, grain stores and cattle were torched. No one was spared – women, children, elderly people.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but tensions have been rising since an ethnic Dogon militia was accused of carrying out a massacre in an ethnic Fulani village in March.
Moulaye Guindo, the mayor of the nearby town of Bankass, told Reuters News Agency that Fulanis had attacked the village after dark.
A local official told the AFP: “Right now we have 95 dead civilians. The bodies are burned, we are continuing to look for others.”
The village had about 300 inhabitants, according to an official who spoke to the AFP on condition of anonymity.
Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque, reporting from Dakar in neighboring Senegal, said Malian troops were deployed at the village “trying to secure the area and to ensure there are no more attacks happening in the villages nearby”.
Violence between the Dogon and Fulani has compounded an already dire security situation in Mali’s semi-arid and desert regions, which are used as a base by armed groups with ties to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Syria (ISIS) group.
The Fulani are primarily cattle breeders and traders, while the Dogon are traditionally sedentary farmers.
“Terrorists issues have become mixed up with long-standing inter-communal tensions over access to land, water and grazing,” Paul Melly, a consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Africa Program, told Al Jazeera.
“This has fostered tension between Dogon and Bambara farming communities, on the one hand, and Peul (Fulani) livestock herders on the other. The issues are not easy to solve. Population is rising; climate change is threatening the environment; jihadist preaching has injected an ideological edge; and there have now been a lot of killings, which fuels mistrust and bitterness.”
On May 16, the United Nations mission in Mali (MINUSMA) announced it had recorded “at least 488 deaths” in attacks on Fulanis in the central regions of Mopti and Segou since January 2018.
In the bloodiest raid about 160 Fulani villagers were slaughtered in March at Ogossagou, near the border with Burkina Faso, by suspected Dogon hunters.MINUSMA said that also since January 2018, armed Fulanis had “caused 63 deaths” among civilians in the Mopti region.
“It’s a shock, a tragedy,” MINUSMA chief Mahamat Saleh Annadif said of the latest bloodletting, noting that it came at a time “when we are discussing the renewal of the (MINUSMA) mandate”.
