Mali accused France of allegedly providing weapons to terrorists and violating its airspace in an attempt to destabilize the West African country, local media reported on Wednesday.
According to a report published in the weekly Jeune Afrique, the capital Bamako said it denounced, in particular, the repeated violations of its airspace by the French forces, whose last troops officially left the country on Tuesday.
Afrique quoted a letter dated Aug. 16 and signed by Mali's Foreign Affairs Minister Abdoulaye Diop that called for an emergency meeting with the United Nations to take stock of the situation in the country.
In the letter to the head of the U.N. Security Council dated Monday, Diop said its airspace has been breached more than 50 times this year, mostly by French forces using drones, military helicopters and fighter jets.
"These flagrant violations of Malian airspace were used by France to collect information for terrorist groups operating in the Sahel and to drop arms and ammunition to them," the letter said.
Mali provided no evidence to show that France had supplied arms to terrorists.
"France has obviously never supported, directly or indirectly, these terrorist groups, which remain its designated enemies across the planet," said the French Embassy in Mali, in a Twitter thread.
It said that 53 French soldiers had died during its nine-year mission in Mali and that France had killed hundreds of extremist fighters in order to improve security for Malians. France has also suffered attacks at home, it added.
The accusations mark a new low in relations just as France pulls the last of its troops out of Mali and Russian mercenaries hired by Mali's military government expand their reach. The swap worries Western powers who see their influence slipping in the Sahel.
On Tuesday, French authorities announced that they had withdrawn their last troops from Mali ending a nine-year operation in the West African country that was its hub to tackle militants in the Sahel region.
On Wednesday, a coalition of 15 civil society organizations in neighboring Niger expressed disappointment against the deployment of French troops in their country. According to local publication La Nouvelle Tribune, civil society organizations called for protests demanding the immediate departure of the French.
French forces were welcomed as heroes in Mali in 2013, but a series of setbacks and prolonged attacks by the militants have soured relations, which became worse since a military junta overthrew the government in 2020 and later overthrew an interim civilian Cabinet.