New Bellingcat investigation sheds light on civilian deaths in Mali’s drone war
In recent years, Mali in West Africa has been mired in conflict. The ruling junta has been battling several insurgent groups, some affiliated with al-Qaeda.
The Malian military has partly relied on Russian mercenaries, who have failed to dislodge the extremists.
Recently, government forces have used drones to carry out what they describe as effective targeted strikes on terrorists. A segment by state-run broadcaster ORTM highlighted [4:50-5:31] the success of a drone attack near Timbuktu. A reporter said Malian armed forces “successfully engaged a pickup truck transporting supplies intended for terrorist hideouts.”
Aerial video footage shows a person walking near the truck shortly before it was struck with an explosive device. Doctors Without Borders says that the attack struck civilians, and 3 of the 4 people killed were young girls.
A new report by the online investigative group Bellingcat has shed more light on Mali’s drone war and its impact on civilians. Bellingcat researcher Sebastian Vandermeersch described the contradictions of that July drone strike to The World’s Host Marco Werman.
“What’s really striking is that the Malian news readers typically portray this sort of narrative of precision strikes on terrorists and their logistics again and again. And when I go on Twitter and I follow a lot of local news sources in northern Mali, they seem to contradict this narrative quite a lot, which prompted me to dig further into this.”
Marco Werman: Yeah. So what have you found?
Sebastian Vandermeersch: In the case of Zouéra, it does appear that civilians were struck. And what’s remarkable is they’re showing this footage on the news as if it’s a precise strike. But even in the video, we can see they’re targeting a pickup truck which is parked essentially right next to a different structure, which was reportedly a restaurant. When we geolocated and verified footage from the scene, we were able to see that there were people who appeared to have been killed in this strike who were not even in the pickup truck that they appeared to be targeting. So basically, we were able to establish that this is part of a pattern in which Mali is portraying these strikes as precise strikes on terrorists and their logistics. But in many cases, the videos that they’re showing on the news are actually showing strikes on civilians and on commercial activity, like fuel sellers, like people driving trucks for all sorts of reasons.
And Zouéra is not the only incident you examine where civilians ended up being struck. There were two other drone attacks in 2024 that the national broadcaster hailed as a “surgical strike against terrorists.” What did you learn about those attacks?
Yeah. So does that suggest that these drone strikes might actually be further radicalizing the local population, rallying people against the military junta?
Absolutely. And I think that that’s completely consistent with the literature that we’ve seen coming out of different sorts of conflict zones where drones are used often indiscriminately against civilians. If you talk to anyone from northern Mali, this is the number one issue on their radar: these indiscriminate drone strikes, and people are going to bed not knowing if they’ll wake up alive.
Can you talk a little bit more, Sebastian, about the scale of civilian deaths in all this fighting?
According to ACLED data, hundreds and hundreds of civilians have been killed in these strikes in the last few years. We [couldn’t] verify exact numbers with Bellingcat. What we can say is that in the strikes that we have verified in this piece, we can see dozens and dozens of bodies, a lot of which appear to be women and children, and no clear signs that they belong to any military group. So it’s a really murky conflict in which civilians seem to have been getting caught up.
So, is the sense at Bellingcat and Jeune Afrique that the drone war in Mali is discriminating between the two militias or not?
I think our reporting shows that in many cases, the drones just fail to distinguish. I think this aligns with years of reporting from human rights organizations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, which have covered several of these incidents. What we’ve tried to do is really bring together three years’ worth of drone strikes because there’s so many restrictions on reporting in Mali on the ground. Journalism is extremely tough with the junta in place. So we felt that, using open sources, we could really bring together, reconstruct, and examine this whole pattern, which has been taking place for years, and which does indicate that there is a failure to distinguish between civilians and militants, which has been ongoing for years.
How has the Malian government responded to your reporting?
We reached out to several colonels within the Malian military. We’ve also reached out via email and different sources provided by our partners at Jeune Afrique, and we have not received a substantive response so far.
Just going back to the clip we heard in our introduction, Sebastian: the account on Malian state TV of a drone strike in July. I mean, this is state TV, and I wonder what the tone is of how Mali’s media presents these drone videos that the national military is providing to them?
What’s really striking is that the language used by the newsreaders is extremely dramatic, very dehumanizing in some cases, talking of eviscerating their targets, sending them to the other side. An expert told us it was akin to Mali’s favorite national saga, and that this is like an ongoing episode every night for people to watch and enjoy.
And does state TV provide any context? Like, do they talk about casualties? Or collateral damage?
They do not. They never talk about casualties or collateral damage. The assumption from the get-go is always that terrorist targets were hit. They’re never critical. And it’s quite shocking, really.
So how is this news being received by the Malian population, mostly in the capital, Bamako?
It’s very hard to say. It’s not something that we are able to sort of assess or gauge given the lack of independent press in Mali. For instance, Jeune Afrique, our partner publication in this investigation, has been banned in Mali for being too critical of the Malian government, and it’s trying to restrict any sort of critical voice that could support any narrative other than that of the Malian government.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
