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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 contingent of 1,200 troops sent in mid-February to fight Mali's nine-year-old jihadist insurgency as part of the G5 Sahel force. 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 latest fatalities came on the same day that Mali's interim government -- installed after a military coup last August and still in the grip of military officers -- said presidential and parliamentary elections would take place in March 2022. Dissatisfaction with the elected former president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita's handling of the jihadist insurgency was a major factor in his overthrow by mutinous soldiers. yas-amt/tgb/ri
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