Russia's Wagner says it has recovered bodies of mercenaries killed in Mali

PHOTO CAPTION: A screen grab from a handout video shows people who Tuareg rebels say are Russian Wagner mercenaries with Mali soldiers in northeastern Mali, near Aguelhok, Mali, July 2024. via Coordination of Azawad Movements

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia's Wagner mercenary group said that its fighters had recovered the bodies of its mercenaries killed in a July battle with Tuareg rebels and Islamists during a desert sandstorm in Mali.

Mali, where military authorities seized power in coups in 2020 and 2021, is battling a years-long Islamist insurgency that spun out of a Tuareg separatist rebellion in the north of the Sahel country.

Wagner said in July that it took heavy losses in the battle, which it fought alongside Malian armed forces, but gave few details.

"An operation was successfully completed to return the bodies of our brothers, who in July 2024 heroically took up the fight with Islamists many times outnumbered," Wagner said in a rare statement on Telegram late on Tuesday.

The loss of the battle in July illustrated the dangers faced by Russian mercenary forces working for military juntas, which are struggling to contain separatists and powerful offshoots of Islamic State and Al Qaeda across the arid Sahel region in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Mali's army said in a statement that it had also recovered the bodies of its soldiers from the area where the July ambush took place.

But a spokesman for the rebel group denied Wagner's claim that it had reclaimed the bodies of its fighters.

"It's not true, there are no Wagner bodies there," Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane, a spokesman for a Tuareg organisation known as the Permanent Strategic Framework for Peace, Security and Development, told Reuters.

The rebels moved the Wagner bodies away from the site shortly after the battle, he said Sunday on social media.

The statements are part of a pattern of conflicting claims: last week Wagner claimed two of its fighters captured in Mali had died, while the rebels insisted both were still alive.

Wagner said its fighters had passed through a desert area near Tinzaouaten in north Mali that was "teeming with Azawad militants".

"The bodies of our fallen brothers will return to the homeland," Wagner said. "We do not leave our own, and all of them - dead or alive - will be returned home."

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Tiemoko Diallo in Bamako;Editing by Christina Fincher and Portia Crowe)