{O/C} We turn to the calamity in Mali, where Russian mercenaries affiliated with the Wagner Group and Malian troops were in cahoots over the massacre in Moura.
Despite another slain UN peacekeeper, West African heads of state have held off further punitive sanctions on the Malian coup leader.
But the restoration work surrounding mauled mausoleums is now being carried out in Timbuktu to safeguard the witnesses to Mali's political travails.
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Mali has been battling armed militants over the past decade, initially with the assistance of French forces. Yet souring relations between France and the Malian coup leader, who snagged power last year, had French troops giving Mali a wide berth.
In the largest Malian city of Bamako, thousands of merchants and villagers found their way to the packed market of Moura in central Mali in March prior to Ramadan.
But low-flying and rumbling helicopters firing weapons sent villagers ducking and covering.
Marauding Malian and Wagner Group troops, emboldened, looted houses, with hundreds of men executed without interrogation on floodplains.
The reign of terror - the Russian Wagner Group boasting mercenaries - had patently got its feet under the Malian table.
Analysts describe the group, purportedly headed by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, as a proxy force of Russia's defence ministry as they often deploy mercenaries and peddle disinformation in its central Mali toehold.
The some 1,000 soldiers of fortune in Mali's 15 military bases have curried favour with embattled political and military leaders who pay for their services in cash or even gold.
Analysts pointed out the death toll in Moura hovered at around 300 to 400. But one thing's for certain: The bestial slaughter never halted. So much so, countless upped sticks.
The situation can be likened to the extermination of Jews by Germany's brutal dictator, Hitler, back in the 1940s.
Nearly 500 civilians have been killed in the operations conducted by both the Malian military and reckless mercenaries there.
As such, the United Nations sent peacekeepers to monitor the situation. Still, troops had the temerity to blast one UN peacekeeper to death.
A burgeoning litany of human rights abuses has been drawn up by the United Nations.
Residents have become disillusioned with White soldiers, and with the serried ranks of houses wiped out, are confronting retribution.
Meantime, West African leaders have suspended punishments against the Malian leader.
The rehabilitation of what Islamists consider Mali's idolatrous cultural heritage is now underway to salvage the country's emblematic written manuscripts and reconstruct pulverised mausoleums in the city of 333 saints.
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