Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent.
With the massacre of at least 35 civilians this week in a small village in central Mali, including 24 children, the country’s ongoing cycle of ethnic violence appears to be escalating.
A militant Islamist uprising that began in 2012 exacerbated existing tensions between the region’s pastoralist Dogon communities and the semi-nomadic Fulani herders, in the form of tit-for-tat killings between the two ethnic groups. The scale and intensity of those attacks are increasingly on the rise.