The Diplomat
Mali’s Council of Ministers meeting under the presidency of Colonel Assumi Goita, who led the coup d’état perpetrated in that country in August 2020, has appointed a new ambassador to Spain, replacing Abdoulaye Koumare, who had held the post since 2016.
Koumare, who was a general in the Malian army, will be replaced by another general, Abdrahamane Baby, a military officer with a long history in the country.
Baby served as chief of staff of the army and, in 2019, was appointed deputy chief of staff of the Malian Armed Forces.
The new ambassador will arrive in Madrid shortly after the decision of Assimi Goita, president of the Malian Transition, to postpone the elections of February 2022, which had been announced to be held in February 2022.
Last week, Abdoulaye Diop’s current foreign minister said that the elections had been postponed because of “security problems” in the country, and that the government considers that it must first “create the necessary conditions” to hold them, something it is working on.
In August 2020, Goita led a coup d’état against Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, and later, in May of this year, he led another coup in which he removed the president of the transitional government, Bah Ndaw, and his prime minister, Moctar Ouane, from power.
Spain has some 600 military personnel deployed in Mali as part of the European Union mission (EUTM) to train the country’s security forces to confront the jihadist terrorism operating in the Sahel. Last August, a terrorist attack took the lives of 40 soldiers from an elite unit prepared by Spanish and US troops.
