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| - Two Chadians in a five-nation regional force created to fight jihadists in insurgency-wracked Mali were killed on Thursday by a highway bomb, the UN said. "A Chadian army vehicle drove over an explosive device in central Mali, killing two Chadian soldiers," the UN's representative in Mali, Mahamat Saleh Annadif, told AFP. The two belonged to a battalion of 1,200 troops sent in mid-February to fight Mali's jihadist insurgency as part of the G5 Sahel force, he said. A Chadian diplomat confirmed the information to AFP. The attack occurred in the Boulkessi zone -- a region where the Serma Katiba, a shadowy member of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM) in the Sahel, reputedly operate. The unrest in Mali began in 2012 when jihadists allied with a regional revolt in the north of the country. The insurgency then spread to central Mali and to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, claiming thousands of lives and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Several anti-jihadist military operations have been launched, including the French operation Barkhane and the G5 Sahel, which brings together units from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. The Chadian contingent has been deployed in the so-called tri-border region -- a flashpoint area where the frontiers of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso come together. Its base is on the Niger side of the border, at Tera. The latest fatalities came on the same day that Mali's interim government -- installed after a coup last August and still in the grip of military officers -- said presidential and parliamentary elections would take place in February-March 2022. Dissatisfaction with the elected former president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita's handling of the insurgency was a major factor in his overthrow by mutinous soldiers. yas-amt/tgb/ri/tgb
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