Mali Tuaregs Control Major Military Base Near Algeria Border

Tuareg rebels said Sunday they had taken control of Tessalit military base in the north of Mali, near Border with Algeria, after having surrounded the location for weeks.

“There are no Malian soldiers left in the base, they have all fled,’’ AP news agency has quoted Bayes Ag Dicknane, an officer with the rebel forces on the ground near Tessalit, as saying.

About 600 rebel fighters had taken part in the operation to take the base in Tessalit and none of the rebels had been killed, Ag Dicknane said. He did not say if any Malian troops had died.

The rebels are now chasing vehicles that fled the base, Ag Dicknane said. “One of their vehicles has had an accident and there are 3 people dead and others badly injured. I don’t know if the dead are soldiers or civilians’’

The government has few bases in the Sahara Desert and Tessalit is of strategic importance because it is one of the largest in northern Mali and it has an airport. 

The fighters of the National Movement (NMLA) for the Liberation of the Azawad have been surrounding the military base at Tessalit since late January, but said they have held off on an assault because some families of the troops were still inside.

Mali Ministry of Defense said it has decided to evacuate the base as to safeguard the live of 1500 civilians, vowing to fight back to recoup it. 

Moussa Ag Assarid, a spokesman for the rebels based in Paris, said the military was “using the civilians in the camp as protection.’’

The Malian army said it has sent a number of ground units to try to resupply the base at Tessalit over the last few weeks. The rebels said their forces always managed to prevent the government forces from reaching the base.

In mid-February the United States carried out a food drop for Tessalit. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Bamako said a U.S. military aircraft dropped enough food for 2,000 people for several days.

The NMLA began attacking towns across north Mali in mid-January.

Some of these people have fled to areas in Mali and also in neighboring Algeria, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania.

The rebels say they are fighting for the independence of the north of Mali, a region they refer to as the Azawad.