Mali's army launched an offensive on Friday against Tuareg rebels who had attacked a north-eastern garrison, officials said, and in neighbouring Niger the military said it killed 11 of the nomadic desert insurgents.
The governments of the West African states whose territories jut into the southern Sahara are struggling to contain separate rebellions by nomadic Tuareg fighters who have been raiding army camps and ambushing convoys in the vast expanses of the desert.
Malian defence ministry officials said government forces were hunting the heavily armed rebel raiders who killed 15 soldiers in an attack this week on the garrison at Abeibara, 150 km (90 miles) from the Saharan trading town of Kidal. The army said 17 of its soldiers were killed in what was one of the bloodiest clashes to date in the latest insurgency by the Malian Tuaregs, who also rose in revolt in the 1990s against the central government over 1,000 km (600 miles) away in Bamako.