Videos are circulating on social networks such as TikTok showing an alleged case of the Malian army practising cannibalism.
A soldier, dressed in an army uniform, is seen gutting his dead opponent. In the second part of the video, he roasts the victim’s liver over a fire and expresses his intention to eat it.
The soldier filming this is holding severed fingers as a souvenir. The video is believed to have been filmed near the Mauritanian border in 2022 and is currently under investigation by the Malian army. Sources from Mali’s security forces and human rights organisations that spoke to Radio France International believe that the video may have been recorded in the town of Sokolo in south-central Mali in June 2022, or the village of Mourdiah in May 2023.
Speaking in local Malian Bambara language, the man says he is going to eat the victim’s liver, according to comments and media reports on the footage. A surrounding group of men in fatigues laugh as he cuts through the corpse.
Mali’s armed forces have ordered an investigation into the video. The army chief said in a statement in July that this was a “rare atrocity akin to cannibalism”, adding that the act did not align with the Sahelian West African nation’s military values.
Rights groups and the United Nations have repeatedly accused Malian soldiers of serious abuses, including executions and torture, committed against civilians suspected of collaborating with jihadist groups that have been waging an insurgency in the Sahel since 2012. The army has always denied any wrongdoing.
Reports of abuses and atrocities against civilians by the Malian Armed Forces have steadily increased since the 2022 coup that saw a military junta take control of the country, with Russian Wagner Group (now Africa Corps) mercenaries hired by the junta accused of jointly committing massacres of unarmed civilians with the Malian military.
Despite the junta’s hiring of Wagner to replace the UN peacekeeping and EU training mission it expelled, it has lost control of growing parts of northern Mali to Tuareg separatists, Islamist fighters of al-Qaeda affiliate Support Group for Islam and Muslims (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimin or JNIM), and Islamic State’s Sahel Province.
Hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions displaced as militants have seized territory and foreign-backed armies retaliated. The failure to restore security has contributed to two military coups in Mali, two in neighbouring Burkina Faso, and one in Niger since 2020.
The video was trending on X, but has since been removed for violating the platform’s rules.
The Cannibal Guy 