Bamako – Three soldiers with the UN peacekeeping force in northern Mali have been injured by a highway bomb, the mission said on Tuesday.
“One of our convoys which was heading to Timbuktu on November 21 hit a mine. Three Blue Helmets were injured, one of them seriously,” MINUSMA said on social media, without giving their nationalities.
MINUSMA – the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali – was created in 2013 after the north of the country was overrun in a regional insurgency fuelled by jihadists.
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The jihadist campaign later spread to the centre of the country, where it inflamed long-running ethnic divisions.
Thousands of civilians, combatants, troops and police have died, and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes.
The UN force is one of the biggest peacekeeping missions in the world and one of its deadliest.
A total of 181 MINUSMA personnel have died in hostile acts, 76 of them by improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
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Source: AFP
Picture: Pexels
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