BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — Mali troops subdued the Islamic militants who attacked a military training camp and the airport in Mali’s capital Tuesday after gunbattles that killed some soldiers, authorities said. An al-Qaida-linked group claimed the attack.
The militants tried to infiltrate the Faladie military police school in Bamako in a rare attack for the capital before government troops were able to “neutralize” the attackers, army Chief of Staff Oumar Diarra said on national TV, without elaborating.
At least 15 suspects were arrested, a security official who was inside the training camp at the time of the attack told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to reporters.
“This cowardly and perfidious attack led to some losses of life on the army’s side,” the army said in a statement read on national television in the evening, confirming that trainees at the military training camp were killed but not saying how many.
Mali's army also confirmed the militants targeted the airport, in the statement.
The al-Qaida-linked militant group JNIM claimed responsibility for the attacks on its website Azallaq. Videos posted by JNIM show fighters setting a plane on fire. The group claimed to have inflicted “major human and material losses."
An AP reporter heard two explosions in the area earlier Tuesday and saw smoke rise from a location on the outskirts of the city where the camp and airport are located.
Soon after the attacks, Mali’s authorities closed the airport, with Transport Ministry spokesman Mohamed Ould Mamouni saying flights were suspended because of the exchange of gunfire nearby. The airport reopened later in the day.
The U.S. Embassy in Bamako told its staff to remain at home and stay off the roads.
Mali, along with its neighbors Burkina Faso and Niger, has for more than a decade battled an insurgency fought by armed groups, including some allied with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. Following military coups in all three nations in recent years, the ruling juntas have expelled French forces and turned to Russian mercenary units for security assistance instead.
Since taking power, Col. Assimi Goita has struggled to stave off jihadi attacks. Attacks in central and northern Mali are increasing. In July, approximately 50 Russian mercenaries in a convoy were killed in an al-Qaida ambush.
Attacks in the capital of Bamako are rare, however.
“I think JNIM wanted to show they can also stage attacks in the south and in the capital, following the battle on the north near the Algeria border where Wagner suffered losses," said Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which promotes democracy.
In 2022, gunmen struck a Malian army checkpoint about 60 kilometers (40 miles) outside the city, killing at least six people and wounding several others. In 2015, another al-Qaida linked extremist group killed at least 20 people, including one American, during an attack on a hotel in Bamako.
Tuesday’s attack is significant because it showed that JNIM has the ability to stage a large-scale attack, Wassim Nasr, a journalist and senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, told the AP.
It also shows they are concentrating on military targets, rather than random attacks on civilians, he said.
Mednick reported from Goma, Congo, and Banchereau from Dakar, Senegal.
This video grab shows Malian security personnel detaining a man after Mali's army said a military training camp in the capital Bamako has been attacked early Tuesday, Sept. 17 2024. (AP Photo)
FILE - Leader of Mali's ruling junta Lt. Col. Assimi Goita, center, attends an independence day military parade in Bamako, Mali on Sept. 22, 2022. (AP Photo, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Iranian hackers sought to interest President Joe Biden's campaign in information stolen from rival Donald Trump's campaign, sending unsolicited emails to people associated with the then-Democratic candidate in an effort to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other federal agencies said Wednesday.
There's no indication that any of the recipients responded, officials said, and several media organizations approached over the summer with leaked stolen information have also said they did not respond. Kamala Harris' presidential campaign called the emails from Iran “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity” that were received by only a few people who regarded them as spam or phishing attempts.
The emails were received before the hack of the Trump campaign was publicly acknowledged, and there’s no evidence the recipients of the emails knew their origin.
The announcement is the latest U.S. government effort to call out what officials say is Iran’s brazen, ongoing work to interfere in the election, including a hack-and-leak campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies linked last month to Tehran.
U.S. officials in recent months have used criminal charges, sanctions and public advisories to detail actions taken by foreign adversaries to influence the election, including an indictment targeting a covert Russian effort to spread pro-Russia content to U.S. audiences.
It's a stark turnabout from the government's response in 2016, when Obama administration officials were criticized for not being forthcoming about the Russian interference they were seeing on Trump's behalf as he ran against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
In this case, the hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with Biden's campaign before he dropped out. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a statement released by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The agencies have said the Trump campaign hack and an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign are part of an effort to undermine voters’ faith in the election and to stoke discord.
The FBI informed Trump aides within the last 48 hours that information hacked by Iran had been sent to the Biden campaign, according to a senior campaign official granted anonymity to speak because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.
The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets — Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post — were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.
Politico reported that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — passed along what appeared to be a research dossier that the campaign had apparently done on the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The document was dated Feb. 23, almost five months before Trump selected Vance as his running mate.
In a statement, Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said the campaign has cooperated with law enforcement since learning that people associated with Biden’s team were among the recipients of the emails.
“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign; a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” Finkelstein said. "We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.
Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the effort to dangle stolen information to the Biden campaign “further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election” to help Harris.
Intelligence officials have said Iran opposes Trump’s reelection, seeing him as more likely to increase tension between Washington and Tehran. Trump’s administration ended a nuclear deal with Iran, reimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, an act that prompted Iran’s leaders to vow revenge.
Iran’s intrusion on the Trump campaign was cited as just one of the cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns identified by tech companies and national security officials at a hearing Wednesday of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Executives from Meta, Google and Microsoft briefed lawmakers on their plans for safeguarding the election, and the attacks they’d seen so far.
“The most perilous time I think will come 48 hours before the election,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told lawmakers during the hearing, which focused on American tech companies’ efforts to safeguard the election from foreign disinformation and cyberattacks.
Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump makes a campaign stop at Pubkey Bar and Media House, Wednesday, Sept.18, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
