Fighting alongside Malian soldiers, Wagner mercenaries have massacred civilians and burned their villages in northern Mali, fueling a fast-growing refugee crisis.

«  It is death that made me flee, I saw death everywhere. » said Housseini ag Mohamed, who escaped the violence in northern Mali. His story is one of many among the 149,000 refugees now living in and around the M’Bera camp in Mauritania, near the Malian border. Since 2023, the number of displaced has tripled. Their accounts are harrowing: massacres, decapitations, women assaulted, villages burned.
They describe white men in masks — Wagner mercenaries working with Mali’s junta — attacking civilians with overwhelming brutality. Many fled not from Islamist groups, but from state-backed violence. « It is only women that are left — they have killed all the men », said Izi Sidi Ahmed, a refugee in Douankara, Mauritania, who lost her 30-year-old son, killed by a Wagner patrol three miles from their camp while on his way to sell goods at a cattle market just across the border.