A French journalist denounces his kidnapping in Mali in a video posted on social networks

The French journalist Olivier Dubois was kidnapped on April 8 in northeast Mali and is in the hands of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM, for its acronym in Arabic), one of the most active jihadist groups in this African country linked to Al Qaeda, as revealed by Dubois himself in a video that began to circulate this Wednesday on social networks.

The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed the disappearance of the journalist and claimed to be in contact with his family and the Malian authorities, a French government official told France Press.

In the 21-second video, the reporter, a regular contributor to media such as

and

, appears sitting cross-legged on the ground inside a kind of tent and dressed in a traditional costume from pink colour. Staring at the camera, he says the following: “My name is Olivier Dubois, I am French, I am a journalist. I was kidnapped in Gao on April 8, 2021 by JNIM. I am writing to my family, my friends and the French authorities to do everything possible to free me ”.

Dubois had worked in Mali for years and was known for his information on the jihadist conflict that has been bleeding this country and the entire central Sahel since 2012. In one of his latest articles, published on April 3 in

, the journalist I was interviewing Youssouf Toloba, chief of the Dan Na Ambassagou Dogon militia. “He is an experienced reporter who knows the region well and who went to this very dangerous area in the east of the country on his own initiative. We were informed of his disappearance two days later. In coordination with the media for which he usually works, we made the decision not to report his kidnapping so as not to hinder the possibility of a quick and positive outcome, ”Reporters Without Borders assures on his Twitter account.

Olivier Dubois thus becomes the only French citizen kidnapped in the Sahel after the liberation, in October 2020, of the French-Swiss Sophie Pétronin. However, he joins the list of Western citizens in the hands of jihadist groups: the Romanian Iulian Ghergut, head of security of a mine kidnapped six years ago in Burkina Faso, the octogenarian Australian doctor Kenneth Elliot, captured in 2016 in this same country , the American humanitarian worker Jeffery Rey Woodke, who was abducted in 2016 in the Niger desert, the Colombian nun Gloria Cecilia Narváez, held since 2017 in Mali, and the German aid worker Jörg Lange, kidnapped in western Niger three years ago.

Mali is immersed in a conflict against different jihadist groups since in 2012 three of them took up arms against the Government and came to control three regions in the north of the country. Since then, some 10,000 people have died in Mali alone, according to data from the NGO Acled, but jihadism has spread to neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso, where Spanish journalists David Beriain and Roberto Fraile were killed last week. The French military operation Barkhane, with about 5,100 troops, fights against Islamist terrorism in the Sahel. Across the region there are 5.4 million internally displaced persons and refugees.