In lieu of the recent coflicts in the region, some delegations from Mali and Ivory Coast have met today, on Thursday with Faure Gnassingbe, the Togolese President who will be mediating a dispute over the arrest of 49 Ivorian soldiers in Bamako.
Gnassingbe had also met separately with the delegations in the presidential palace in the capital Lome, the sources said.
The Togolese presidency did not publish any statement on the meeting.
Mali’s military junta in July called for the Togolese leader to mediate in the dispute and Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey last week visited Abidjan and Bamako to meet with Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara and Mali’s transitional leader Assimi Goita.
The 49 Ivorian soldiers were detained after their arrival at Bamako airport on July 10.
Mali has called them “mercenaries”, but Ivory Coast says they were sent to provide back-up duties for the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali.
A UN spokesman has said that while they were not UN peacekeeping troops as such, they were part of “national support elements” routinely deployed by contributing countries.
Mali is struggling with a long jihadist insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. It is also in the grip of political upheaval after colonels angry at the government’s handling of the insurgency seized power in August 2020.
In another report, the Malian army announced on Sunday that they have succeded in thwarting a fresh attack which had been made on a military camp in the centre of the country, two days after a deadly suicide attack in a strategic garrison town near the capital of the country.
Armed forces “once again foiled” an attempted attack on a camp in Sevare early on Sunday, the army said on social media.
“The provisional toll stands at one terrorist neutralised,” it added.
A high-ranking official from the Sevare camp, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP: “The situation is under control.”
“Our camp of the national guard has been attacked on Sunday at Sevare by terrorists… During the response, we neutralised a terrorist,” the official said.