Mali army uses cluster bombs in north, Bellingcat finds
bellingcat says Mali’s army and its Russian allies used cluster bombs for the first time in northern Mali last week, dropping them at least twice during anti-terror operations. One strike hit Oubder near In-Gouzma in the Timbuktu region last Friday, and another hit Tadjmart near Aguelhoc in the Kidal region on Sunday.
Images obtained by RFI let specialists identify a Russian-made RBK-500 cluster bomb and ShOAB-0.5 bomblets. Mali ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions after it came into force in 2010, and the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor says more than 90 percent of people killed or wounded by cluster bombs worldwide are civilians, many of them children.
Timbuktu and Kidal strikes
The first strike landed at Oubder near In-Gouzma in the Timbuktu region last Friday. The second followed on Sunday at Tadjmart near Aguelhoc in the Kidal region. Those are the two places where the reported use was identified, and both are in northern Mali, where the army has been fighting jihadist groups, separatist movements, and the army in the north for more than a decade.
The image evidence matters because the weapons were not described in general terms. Specialists identified a Russian-made RBK-500 cluster bomb and ShOAB-0.5 bomblets from the pictures, tying the reported strikes to specific submunitions rather than to an unverified label.
Convention on Cluster Munitions
More than 100 countries have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and Mali ratified the treaty in 2010 after it entered into force. The treaty status makes the reported use in northern Mali harder to treat as routine battlefield noise; it sits inside a legal framework that many states have accepted and that the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor links to civilian harm worldwide.
The monitor says more than 90 percent of people killed or wounded by cluster bombs worldwide are civilians, and many of those civilian victims are children. For communities in Timbuktu and Kidal, that is not an abstract statistic: it points to risk in places where people live, travel, and shelter during military operations, even when the strikes are described as anti-terror operations.
What comes next in Mali
The reported strikes now place the use of cluster munitions in Mali under scrutiny from the treaty regime and from rights monitors that track civilian harm. The practical question for residents of Oubder, In-Gouzma, Tadjmart, and Aguelhoc is whether any further strikes follow in the same northern corridor, because the only new material in the record is that the weapons were used at least twice last week.
bellingcat’s account leaves a narrow but important trail: two strikes, two northern regions, and identifiable cluster munition types. That is the evidence readers can act on now, and it is the basis on which the next review of Mali’s conduct will be judged.
