It was only a few hours after the French warnings. The Malian army said Friday evening it had discovered a mass grave near from the base returned to him four days ago the French army in Gossi, in the north of the country. Earlier, the French General Staff had published a video in which it believes Wagner’s Russian mercenaries are burying bodies to accuse the French of leaving a mass grave.
“Bodies in a state of decay were discovered in a mass grave not far from the camp formerly occupied by the French army Barkhane,” the General Staff of the Malian Armies confirmed in a press release. On Tuesday, the French General Staff had already warned of “informational attacks” aimed at discrediting the French army on the occasion of the handover of the Gossi base.
Video filmed by drone
In this video made by drone that AFP had access to on Thursday evening (and shared on Twitter), and which the French General Staff describes as an “informative attack,” soldiers can be seen dealing with corpses they cover with sand. In another series, we see two of these soldiers filming the half-buried bodies.
The staff assures that it is white soldiers it has identified on videos and photos taken in other places. Some photos also show vehicles leaving a base whose structure and environment match Gossi’s hold, where an AFP team has already been twice.
“Structured Information Maneuver”
At the start of this informative response, images were broadcast on a .’s Twitter account on Thursday called Dia Diarra, who proclaims himself a “former soldier” and a “Malian patriot”. This account was created in January 2022, AFP found. After warning on Wednesday of the imminent release of a video showing the abuses by the French, the next day he posted a photo of blurry corpses buried in the sand, commenting: “This is what the French left behind when they left the base at #Gossi (…) we can’t shut up about that!”. The same account later posts a short video of these half-buried bodies.
“We are witnessing a structured informational maneuver” based on the “scaling up of an initial tweet,” said staff spokesman Colonel Pascal Ianni.
The Dia Diarra account “is most likely a fake account created by Wagner”, the Russian private military company, the French staff estimate. “This maneuver to discredit the force (French anti-jihadist in the Sahel) Barkhane seems coordinated. It is representative of the multiple informational attacks to which the French soldiers have been subjected over many months.”
According to the French army, “the comparison of the photos published on Twitter and the images collected by the specialized sensor makes it possible to establish a direct link between what Wagner’s mercenaries do and what is wrongly given to the French soldiers. attributed”.
According to her, these “statements testify to the methods of action of Wagner’s mercenaries, which have been observed since[his]deployment in the Central African Republic and have been denounced by many international organizations and NGOs”.
