Last German troops leave Mali as decade-long UN mission ends

The final German soldiers departed Mali on Tuesday, sources told dpa, ending a decade-long deployment to the West African country as part of a United Nations peacekeeping force.

The final German soldiers left Camp Castor, their base near the airport on the outskirts of Gao, and will stop over on the Atlantic coast of Africa before returning to the Wunstorf Air Base in Germany, the security sources said.

The camp was handed over to the Mali government before departure on Tuesday. The camp had been the centre of Germany's deployment as part of the UN mission.

UN blue helmets held a formal closing ceremony on Monday at the MINUSMA peacekeeping mission's headquarters in Bamako. According to the UN, troops from 53 different countries had taken part in the mission.

According to the German military, around 20,000 German soldiers had been deployed as part of the UN mission over the years.

In 2017, two German pilots died when their Tiger combat helicopter crashed in Mali. In 2021, 12 German soldiers were wounded in a suicide attack.

In mid-June, Mali's military government demanded the withdrawal of all 12,000 UN peacekeepers after increasing cooperation with Russian forces.

Mali's Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop accused the UN peacekeepers of having become "part of the problem" instead of having responded adequately to the precarious security situation in the country.

Germany's gradual withdrawal of about 1,000 soldiers took months and was made more difficult after there was a military coup in neighbouring Niger.

German forces had previously used Niger for transit and logistics operations, but those became more difficult as relations with Niger's new military leadership deteriorated.