Russia's Wagner group says it is leaving Mali after “mission accomplished”

PHOTO CAPTION: Illustrative photo — A Russian soldier holds a sniper rifle during a joint training exercise in Tajikistan’s Khatlon Region, August 10, 2021. (REUTERS/Didor Sadulloev)

MOSCOW/DAKAR  -  Russia's Wagner mercenary group said on Friday it was leaving Mali after fighting Islamist militants for three-and-a-half years and returning home after its mission in the African country had been successfully completed. 

Wagner said via its channel in Telegram that it had brought all of the country's regional centres back under the control of the Malian military junta, pushing out Islamist forces and killing their commanders. 

Wagner did not say what its fighters would do once they were back in Russia. 

The announcement follows a spate of attacks in recent weeks that insurgents say killed more than 100 Malian soldiers as well as some mercenaries.

Jama'a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), an insurgent group in West Africa's Sahel region, claimed responsibility for the violence in recent days, including a bombing attack on Wednesday against Malian and Russian soldiers near Bamako.

Wagner has been in Mali since the army, which seized power in two coups in 2020 and 2021, kicked out French and U.N. troops that had been involved in fighting the Islamist insurgents for a decade and replaced them with Russian mercenaries.

Wagner's withdrawal from Mali does not mean that the West African country will be without Russian fighters though. The Africa Corps is still in Mali.

The Corps was created with the support of the Russian Defence Ministry after Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and commander Dmitry Utkin led a failed military mutiny against the Russian army leadership and then left Russia for Belarus with other mercenaries.

Russia has been seeking to end Wagner's deployment to Mali to replace them with the Africa Corps, Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel programme at Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation told Reuters.

"The takeover of the Africa Corps means that the Russian military engagement in Mali will continue, but the focus might change more to training and providing equipment and less actual fighting jihadists," Laessing said.

The Africa Corps is "about 70-80%" made up of former Wagner mercenaries, according to several Telegram chats used by Russian mercenaries seen by Reuters. 

The Malian defence ministry did not immediately respond to request for a comment.

 (Reporting by Filipp Lebedev in London, Portia Crowe and Anait Miridzhanian in Dakar, Editing by Andrew Osborn and William Maclean // REUTERS)