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Mali Extends State of Emergency for Six Months | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Malian soldiers patrol in the streets of Gao on June 13, 2013. (AFP)


Mali announced on Sunday that it was extending the state of emergency in the country by six months in an effort to curb terror attacks.

The National Assembly voted to extend a state of emergency in a bid to quell an upsurge in attacks by militants based in the desert north of the West African country.

On Saturday, Zoumana N’dji Doumbia, president of the National Assembly’s legal commission, announced Friday’s vote that gives security forces extra powers of arrest and detention.

It is the latest extension of an emergency first imposed in November 2015.

Deteriorating security threatens to return Mali to the chaos that nearly tore it to pieces in 2012 when extremists hijacked an ethnic Tuareg rebellion in the north, before French forces pushed them back the following year.

Some 11,000 UN peacekeepers and French troops are deployed in Mali but militants still launch attacks, including a suicide assault on an army base in January that killed at least 77 people.