No fewer than 20 United Nations (UN) peacekeeping officials were injured when militants attacked a temporary base near Kerena, a village in the war-torn centre of the Sahel area.
UN spokesperson, Olivier Salgado, said the incident happened around 7am on Wednesday.
Salgado, who speaks for the UN’s 13,000-strong MINUSMA mission in Mali, said the position was “targeted by direct and indirect fire”.
Mali has been struggling to contain a jihadist insurgency which first emerged in the north of the country in 2012, and has since spread to the centre of the country and to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.
Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands of more have had to flee their homes in nine years of insurgency, APF reports.
