When enough people were selected, they were taken to a nearby building and shot. There was nowhere to hide in the arid bush around the village of Moura in central Mali. The whites had come in helicopters with government soldiers and translators. If the locals tried to run, they would be shot in seconds. “They didn’t even take the time to tie their hands or blindfold them. They just executed them. Some even while still walking. One bullet and that was it,” said Mohammed, a 29-year-old driver and one of the surviving prisoners who witnessed the whole thing. “They also executed a child of about 10 years. I don’t know what his name was or why he was killed.” After three days of sporadic executions in the sun at Mura, the Russians ordered the survivors to dig mass graves to get rid of the awful smell. “For hours, I was taking bloated corpses and throwing them into the pit on the river bank,” Mohammed told the Telegraph this week, visibly shaken and agitated. “We collected 180 bodies. Victims were bloated and disfigured. We could only recognize our friends by their clothes.” Between 200 and 600 men and boys are estimated to have been executed in that village in late March, according to rights groups. Mali’s military junta claims they were all terrorists involved in a previous attack and has denied UN investigators access. The massacre is part of a seismic power shift on the southern side of Europe, where Moscow is overturning France’s – and by extension the West’s – military dominance in the Sahel, with deadly consequences. Paris, the old ruler in this region that stretches along the southern edge of the Sahara, announced this year that it was withdrawing about 5,000 troops after a decade of fighting a losing desert war against jihadist groups. Soon, the only Western forces left in Mali will be a small contingent of German and British troops in the beleaguered UN peacekeeping mission.
