Apparent Military Drone Strike Kills Civilians
A quiet desert night in northern Mali turned deadly when an apparent military drone launched its explosive munition on a tent, leaving an entire family dead. The strike was a recent example of Malian military operations killing civilians and may amount to a war crime.
The November 13 strike at about 9:30 p.m. on the village of Tangatta, in Mali's northern Timbuktu region, killed seven civilians, including five children ages 7 to 15, from the same ethnic Tuareg family, according to media reports and a witness interviewed by Human Rights Watch. The attack displaced all surviving residents of the village.
A 45-year-old teacher who survived the attack told me by phone about seeing the drone in the sky with a light and then hearing a loud explosion. He said he found the bodies of the parents and their five children. "Six of the bodies were charred," he said. "The body of the father was not charred but had visible injuries in his face and left leg. We buried them in two graves, the mother with the children in one, and the father in another."
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The teacher said the Malian military flies drones over Tangatta "every day," as the Azawad Liberation Front (Front de libération de l'Azawad), a coalition of Tuareg armed groups, and the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen, JNIM), operate in the area. No armed men were present at the time of the strike, he said.
Hostilities in northern Mali have intensified since January 2023, when Mali's military authorities ended a 2015 peace deal with Tuareg armed groups. Meanwhile, JNIM has tightened their control across the country, laying siege to the capital, Bamako, and cutting off fuel supplies.
This recent strike is not an isolated incident. Malian forces have previously conducted drone attacks that caused high civilian casualties. The day after the incident in Tangatta, another drone strike in the nearby village of Albouhera reportedly killed two women and two toddlers.
Under the laws of war, civilians must never be targeted. All parties to an armed conflict need to take all feasible precautions to avoid harming civilians and civilian objects. Serious violations, such as attacks that do not discriminate between civilians and combatants, are war crimes if committed deliberately or recklessly.
Malian authorities should urgently conduct an impartial investigation into the Tangatta strike and hold those responsible to account. They should promptly provide adequate compensation to the relatives of the victims. And they should stop carrying out unlawful drone strikes.
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Ilaria Allegrozzi, Senior Sahel Researcher
