Just a few weeks before the Bundestag decides on the future of Germany's engagement in Mali, reports of one of the worst massacres in recent years in the West African country are mounting.

According to a report by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW), Malian forces together with Russian mercenaries from the “Wagner Group” are said to have murdered hundreds of civilians in the past week.

According to HRW, this is "the worst single atrocity" in Mali in the past decade.

An armed conflict has been raging in the country since 2012, which has already claimed the lives of several thousand soldiers and civilians.

France Wittenbrink

Editor in Politics.

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According to HRW, the massacre occurred at the end of March during a military operation in Moura, a town of about 10,000 people in the Djenné administrative region of central Mali, considered one of the main scenes of violence in the Sahel.

A statement by the Malian Defense Ministry on April 1 said the army had killed 203 "terrorists" and arrested 51 others between March 23 and 31.

The area, which was under the control of Islamist fighters, had been “systematically cleaned”.

In the statement, the army stressed that it had complied with international law and human rights.

"White non-French speaking soldiers"

The HRW report published on Tuesday contradicts this view.

Citing 27 people, including 19 witnesses from the Moura area, as well as traders, community leaders, foreign diplomats and security analysts, it said that on the morning of March 27, Malian soldiers arrived by helicopter near the Moura cattle market.

They were accompanied by "white, non-French-speaking" soldiers who are said to be Russian mercenaries from the "Wagner Group".

Known as "Putin's shadow army", the force has been said to have been active in Mali for several months.

According to eyewitnesses, the soldiers exchanged fire with a group of jihadists.

Meanwhile, more and more Malian and foreign soldiers arrived by helicopter, including some with parachutes, spread throughout the city and blocked the exits.

"Another helicopter flew over us and fired on people trying to flee," said a villager quoted in the report.

Up to 300 people were "executed" and hundreds more arrested in the days that followed, HRW said.

Dozens of civilians were shot in small groups - possibly because of their clothing, because they wore a beard like jihadists or because of their ethnicity.

According to the report, civilians were forced to dig mass graves

before they were executed.

Some of the remains were burned beyond recognition.