A few weeks after Tuareg fighters pushed the Malian Army and its Russian supporters out of the northern city of Kidal, hundreds of metal balls the size of oranges rained down on the nearby community of Tadjmart.
The Malian Army soon announced what Tadjmart residents quickly learned: The military has launched cluster bombs against communities in the northern region held by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA).
The Tadjmart attack came after a similar attack a few days earlier in the community of Oubder in the Timbuktu region.
“This is the first time we have seen these cluster bombs,” Tilla Ag Zeini, secretary-general of the Collective for the Defense of the Rights of the People of Azawad/North Mali (CD-DPA), told Radio France International (RFI).
“It is dangerous for civilians and for children who might play with them or touch them. It can be deadly,” Ag Zeini added. “Herders and other people who do not know what they are dealing with could also become victims.”
Mali is among more than 100 countries that have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions, also known as the Oslo Convention, banning cluster bombs because of the risk they pose to civilians. Russia is not part of the agreement.
“Even if it was the allied Russian forces that carried out the bombing, that FAMa claimed responsibility for these strikes in an official statement can be considered a violation of the convention,” Julien Antouly, an expert in international humanitarian law, told RFI.
Witnesses in Oubder and Tadjmart posted images to social media that experts with online investigative groups Bellingcat and Jeune Afrique identified as Russian-made ShOAB-0.5 bomblets contained by a Russian RBK-500 weapon. A single RBK-500 can release up to 565 of the explosives.
The bombs likely were dropped by a Russian Su-24 bomber belonging to Africa Corps, according to RFI. Africa Corps is Russia’s government-controlled military contractor that took the place of Wagner Group mercenaries in 2025.
A video posted to X on May 17 shows a person handling parts of an unexploded bomblet with the text “The Azawadians don’t manufacture weapons; on the contrary, they dismantle them!”
The bombing in Oubder killed a 7-year-old child and injured three women as residents examined the mysterious objects that littered their community. It was the first reported use of cluster bombs against civilians since Russian fighters arrived in Mali.
The Oubder attack overnight on May 16 and 17 happened about three weeks after a joint force of fighters from the FLA and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) drove Malian soldiers and Russian mercenaries out of Kidal.
Oubder was the Malian military’s first cluster bomb attack against the FLA and JNIM, marking an escalation of the ruling junta’s campaign to take control of Mali’s northern region. In January 2024, the junta abandoned the 2015 peace agreement, known as the Algiers Accord, that had given Tuaregs greater control over the Kidal region.
The escalation in Kidal echoed the Russian-backed Syrian government’s use of cluster bombs and barrel bombs against rebels in that country. The Syrian Network for Human Rights decried barrel bombs as “crude, indiscriminate weapons” that can’t distinguish between civilian and military targets.
The Malian junta described the attacks on Oubder as surgical strikes targeting terrorists in the region. Images of cluster bomb munitions in the courtyards of homes and in fields around the community suggest otherwise.
“Serious violations of international law had been observed in the area, and another criminal modus operandi has been added,” Ag Zeini told RFI. “Civilians continue to pay a heavy price in this war.”
