Militants kill 17 soldiers at military base in Mali

The soldiers were attacked at their base in the central town of Nampala, in what Mali's Defense Minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly described as a "coordinated terrorist attack."

At least two groups have claimed responsibility for the attack. The first is the Islamist group Macina Liberation Front which is linked to the jihadist organization Ansar Dine. The second is a recently-formed group from the ethnic Peul community, calling themselves the National Alliance for the Protection of Peul Identity and Restoration of Justice (ANSIPRJ).

"We attacked Nampala this morning to respond to the deadly attacks by the Malian army against our Peul population," Oumar Aldjana, ANSIPRJ's secretary-general told the Associated Press. Peul groups in the region have accused the military of arresting, torturing and killing civilians. He said several trucks and stocks of ammunition were seized and three members of his group were wounded.

However, regional security sources told the AFP that they doubted the veracity of ANSIPRJ's claim, saying that the group was only founded last month and lacked the means to carry out such a raid.

A government statement issued late on Tuesday said it was not yet clear who had carried out the killings. But army spokesman Souleymane Maiga told Reuters that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had also been involved in the attack. The Malian government said it would find and punish those responsible.

Northern Mali has seen ongoing violence since it fell under the control of Tuareg-led rebels allied with Jihadist groups linked to al Qaeda. But attacks from Islamist, criminal and ethnic elements are now becoming more frequent in the country's center close to its borders with Niger and Burkina Faso.

Local versus international

Paul Melly, Associate Fellow at the Africa Program for Chatham House in London, describes the attack as a worrying development. It comes at a time when the Malian government had been hoping that local initiatives designed to diffuse tensions would lead to some level of peace and reconciliation in central Mali.

"This is a very serious attack because it combines activity by local militant groups with the involvement of a major international terrorist group, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb," he said.

However, Melly stressed that even with the number of casualties, the attack is not a sign of weakness of the Malian military but rather a result of the scope of the military's mandate.

"It just shows the extraordinary difficulty of guarding against ambushes of this kind across such a huge territory as northern and central Mali," he said.