Days after a massacre that left dozens of people in central Mali dead, renewed fighting believed to be between the Fulani and Dogon ethnic groups risks plunging the country deeper into a cycle of intercommunal violence.

Gunmen on Wednesday targeted two ethnic Dogon villages in the Bankass district of the Mopti region, according to the mayor of the area.

“Unidentified armed men on motorcycles are surrounding the village and firing at people,” Moulaye Guindo told Reuters news agency via telephone, adding that the attack was still ongoing in the villages of Ogoboro and Nomopere Bomba.

Guindo said there were people wounded who had been taken to a local hospital, but had no information on the number of casualties.

The attacks took place less than 50km away from the village of Sobane-Kou, the site of an hours-long deadly assault overnight on Sunday, which the United Nations condemned as an act of “unspeakable barbarity”.

Early estimates put the death toll in the attack on the largely ethnic Dogon enclave at 95, but Malian authorities on Wednesday revised the figure down to 35. But local leaders insisted that close to 100 were killed.  

Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque, reporting from the Malian capital, Bamako, said he had also received reports of attacks on Fulani. 

“Al Jazeera has spoken to some of the Dogon militias who are now attacking a Fulani village and also an area they say armed groups are in hiding – armed groups they are referring to as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JMIN), a group that has called on Fulanis for revenge attacks against the Dogon community and also against any representative of the state,” he said.

The location and name of the Fulani village was not immediately clear.

‘Children killed’

Ethnic conflict between the Fulani and Dogon have surged after the emergence of the predominantly Fulani JMIN in 2015. Deep grievances over land were at the heart of the rivalry between the Fulani, who are herders, and Dogon, who are farmers.

On May 16, the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA, announced it had recorded “at least 488 deaths” in attacks on Fulanis in the central regions of Mopti and Segou since January 2018.

Armed Fulanis “caused 63 deaths” among civilians in the Mopti region over the same period, it said.

In the bloodiest raid, about 160 Fulani villagers were slaughtered on March 23 at Ogossagou, near the border with Burkina Faso, by suspected Dogon hunters. The attack forced the resignation of the then-prime minister and government.

Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita condemned Sunday’s violence, saying “this country cannot be led by a cycle of revenge and vendetta”. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Boubou Cisse visited Sobane-Kou to “convey the support of the nation and check that security measures have been strengthened”, according to his office.

On Wednesday, authorities issued a statement saying six people had been detained “following routine checks”. Revising the death toll down to 35, the statement said 24 children were among those killed.

That initial toll was based on information from soldiers and the district mayor who visited the village, which is also known as Sobane-Da.

The new “number is based on a painstaking count carried out by a team comprising officials from the [Malian] civil protection force, forensic doctors [and] the public prosecutor of Mopti” region, the statement said.

But Ali Dolo, mayor of the district in which Sunday’s attack took place, told Reuters the revised death toll did not take account of charred body parts that had yet to be identified. In comments to Al Jazeera, Dolo insisted that the number of the people killed was higher than the one given by the government.

‘Troops fail to protect civilians’

Malians have grown increasingly frustrated by failures of Keita’s government to protect them from both ethnic reprisals and armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) group.  

Mali, a former French colony, has been in turmoil since Tuareg rebels and loosely allied fighters took over its north in 2012. French forces intervened in 2013 to push back their advance, but the fighters have since regrouped, tapping into ethnic rivalries to recruit new members and launching attacks across the region.

Al Jazeera’s Haque said the violence in Mopti was occurring despite the strong presence of Malian and international troops.

“There is an EU training mission, there are German and Dutch soldiers, there is an airbase, where the French are based, and there are also Malian troops. They have all the means to intervene and yet time and time again these forces have failed to protect the population,” he said.

“The prime minister went there to try to reassure the population, to say that the Malian state, the Malian soldiers are on the ground. But of course, that’s the crux of the issue – the Malian soldiers, as well as a UN peacekeeping force of 14,000 soldiers, have failed to fulfil their mandate which is to protect the civilian population.”

Analysts said public confidence in the government had slumped, spurring the creation of armed groups.  

“The militias, rightly or wrongly, were created to respond to a need for security among people who no longer have any trust, or very little, in the effectiveness of the institutional responses,” Baba Dakono, of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), told AFP news agency.

Elizabeth Warren leaped ahead of Bernie Sanders into second place in a pair of Democratic presidential primary polls released Wednesday.

Warren has overtaken Sanders nationally, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll, which puts the Massachusetts senator ahead of her Vermont counterpart 16 percent to 12 percent. Former Vice President Joe Biden still leads all contenders with 26 percent support.

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Warren also polls ahead of Sanders in Nevada, where Democrats will caucus next February after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Biden leads the first Monmouth poll of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Nevada with 36 percent support, followed by Warren at 19 percent and Sanders at 13 percent.

“Nevada’s highly unionized service sector workforce may be a good fit for Warren’s policy platform when you look at the Democratic electorates in the four early states,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. “However, she is nowhere near the top tier in terms of candidate preferences among Latino and black voters, who make up a significant part of the party’s base here.”

National polling averages still show Sanders running significantly ahead of Warren. But Warren’s vote share has generally ticked up over the past month or two amid a flurry of policy rollouts and a strong organizing presence in early voting states.

Warren began laying out her vision of “economic patriotism” earlier this month with a plan for a $2 trillion investment of federal funds over 10 years in green research, manufacturing and exporting. She touted several other plans during an MSNBC town hall last week, including protecting access to abortion, an anti-corruption policy to rein in lobbyists and more corporate accountability for major companies.

Warren has more than 50 staffers on the ground in Iowa, and more hires are expected to be announced over the weekend. She expects to have a similarly large presence in New Hampshire and at least 30 staffers each in South Carolina and Nevada, where Warren is working on bringing on Latino interns and setting up caucus trainings in Latino communities.

While Biden has dominated the centrist lane, Warren and Sanders have competed for the party’s left flank. In the Nevada poll, Biden leads the field with moderate and conservative Democrats (47 percent) and somewhat liberal voters (31 percent). Warren narrowly bests Sanders with very liberal voters, 27 percent to 26 percent, but she outperforms him threefold with somewhat liberal voters, 24 percent to 8 percent.

She also ranks at the top as voters’ second choice, though the margin between Warren, Sanders, Biden and California Sen. Kamala Harris is all within 2 percentage points.

In the Economist/YouGov survey, Warren’s net favorability is slighter higher than Sanders’, -6 percent to -7 percent, but Sanders is tied with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for the candidate whom likely Democratic voters would be most disappointed to see win the nomination.

Twenty-percent of respondents said it would disappoint them if Sanders or de Blasio won the Democratic nomination for president. Nineteen percent said the same of Biden. Only 9 percent said they would be disappointed if Warren won the nomination.

The Economist/YouGov survey of 1,500 adults was conducted June 9-11. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points. Monmouth’s Nevada poll of 370 likely caucusgoers was conducted June 6-11. Its margin of error is plus or minus 5.1 percentage points.

A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to killing three Muslim university students in a confrontation which the victims’ families blamed on bigotry.

Craig Stephen Hicks, 50, entered the plea to three counts of first-degree murder in a Durham courtroom packed with dozens of the victims’ family and friends on Wednesday, more than four years after he shot his neighbours, Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha and Razan Abu-Salha, dead in their apartment. 

“I’ve wanted to plead guilty since day one,” Hicks told Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson.

The development came two months after the new district attorney dropped plans to seek the death penalty in hopes of concluding a case that she said had languished too long.

Police said Hicks claimed the confrontation stemmed from competition for parking spaces at the condominium complex where they all lived.

The victims’ families said they believed Hicks acted with anti-Muslim hatred.

The women’s father, psychiatrist Mohammad Abu-Salha, testified to a congressional hearing on hate crimes in April that Hicks had expressed hateful comments about his daughters wearing headscarves in observance of their faith.

“Three beautiful young Americans were brutally murdered and there is no question in our minds that this tragedy was born of bigotry and hate,” Abu-Salha testified before the US House Judiciary Committee.

“I must be one of a few physicians, if not the only one, who read his own children’s murder autopsy reports and details,” Abu-Salha, a doctor, said. “They are seared into my memory.” 

Police say that in February 2015, Hicks burst into a condo in Chapel Hill owned by Barakat and fatally shot the three.

At the time of the incident, Dean Barakat, 23, was a second-year student at the University of North Carolina’s (UNC) School of Dentistry after graduating from NC State.

Yusor Abu-Salha, Barakat’s 21-year-old wife, was also a graduate of NC State and had been accepted to UNC’s dentistry school.

Razan Abu-Salha, Yusor’s 19-year-old sister, excelled as an undergraduate architecture student at NC State.

The three victims were all involved in charity work. They were planning to visit Turkey later in 2015 to volunteer in a dental clinic at a camp for Syrian war refugees.

Barakat was shot several times as he stood in his doorway, autopsy results showed.

His wife and her sister were shot in the head at close range inside the condo.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn has a new attorney: former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, one of the earliest and fiercest critics of the Justice Department and the FBI’s investigation into a potential conspiracy between President Trump’s campaign and Russia.

The move appears to signal a shift in posture, if not in strategy: Powell, a former Justice Department attorney who has written extensively about overzealous prosecutors, has claimed that Flynn was spied on as part of a “set-up” by the FBI, and that his entire case should be “dismissed,” taking a far more aggressive public stance than Flynn’s previous lawyers, Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony, ever did.

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Flynn, who fired Kelner and Anthony last week, awaits sentencing for lying to the FBI about his conversations with former Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak during the transition period. The current federal court docket still doesn’t list a lawyer for Flynn.

Powell said in October that Flynn should withdraw his guilty plea. But she indicated in an email to POLITICO on Wednesday that Flynn’s legal strategy hadn’t changed. “He will continue to cooperate with the government as he has done from the beginning,” she wrote.

Flynn’s old legal team tried to argue in December that the retired lieutenant general was entrapped by the FBI, and it quickly backfired. They claimed at the time that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn in January 2017 about his conversations with Kislyak had tricked him by lulling him into a false sense of security and failing to insist that he have a lawyer present for the interview.

Judge Emmet Sullivan, however, was not sympathetic. “How is raising these points consistent with accepting responsibility?” he asked Flynn and his lawyers as they stood before him. He then lambasted Flynn for lying to federal agents on White House grounds while serving as the president’s national security adviser in January 2017, and for lying about his lobbying work for the Turkish government. “Arguably, you sold out your country,” Sullivan said.

Powell, meanwhile, has made a cottage industry out of attacking Mueller and his team. She has a website called “creepsonamission.com” that sells T-shirts and books attacking former FBI and Justice Department officials involved in the Russia probe and Flynn’s case specifically. And she’s called Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann “the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct.”

In December, Sullivan gave Flynn the opportunity to postpone his sentencing hearing to continue his cooperation with the government in a probe of illegal lobbying for the Turkish government that is being conducted out of the Eastern District of Virginia. A new sentencing hearing has been set for Friday.

Russian police have arrested hundreds of people at a protest in Moscow sparked by the detention of a top investigative reporter last week.

Ivan Golunov was freed on Tuesday following an unprecedented show of media and popular solidarity. All charges against him were dropped and senior police officers were reportedly fired over the alleged planting of narcotics on him.

Despite the journalist’s release, his supporters on Wednesday decided to go ahead with the unsanctioned demonstration in Russia‘s capital to demand punishment for those involved in his alleged framing.

Among those arrested at the rally was opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a prominent political rival of President Vladimir Putin.

“Police ordered people to leave the unauthorised protest, but the protesters were defiant,” Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen, reporting from Moscow, said.

“They protested not only against the arrest of Golunov, but to show their anger at the oppression against the media, and to protest against the system – that people can be arrested on these fake charges here in Russia.”

Police said more than 200 protesters had been arrested, though OVD Info, a group monitoring arrests of opposition figures, said at least 400 had been detained.

The interior ministry said about 1,200 people took part in the demonstration and that those arrested would face charges that could bring up to 20 days in jail, state news agency Tass reported. 

Один pic.twitter.com/CqmWpVNmcD

— Крикливая Нахрапистая Масса (@KsZhivago) June 12, 2019

Golunov, a 36-year-old reporter for the Meduza website, was arrested last week for allegedly dealing synthetic stimulants. His lawyer said he was beaten in custody and information indicating the charges were falsified quickly surfaced.

Police posted photos of drugs allegedly taken in his apartment, but later admitted they were from another case. State TV reported that Golunov had been intoxicated when arrested, but retracted the claim after it was pointed out that a medical document shown in the report specified that he wasn’t. Lawyers said his fingerprints weren’t found on any of the drug packets allegedly found in his apartment.

On Monday, three leading Russian newspapers – Vedomosti, Kommersant and RBC – each published front-page headlines reading: “I am/We are Ivan Golunov,” accompanied by editorials calling for inquiries into the case.

“We do not rule out that Golunov’s detention and subsequent arrest are linked to his professional activities,” they said, adding that the journalist’s detention amounted to an act of intimidation.

Golunov has built a career out of investigating corruption and criminality among Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, and many in the Russian capital believe he was set up as retaliation for his reporting on Moscow City Hall and the city’s crime-ridden funeral industry, The Associated Press news agency reported.

He featured in a 2018 Al Jazeera investigative documentary, The Oligarchs, in which he told the story of securing a rare interview with fugitive Ukrainian  Serhiy Kurchenko , only to be met at gunpoint with an attempted bribe.

Russian human rights activists have often complained – to little effect – of fabricated criminal cases against opposition figures and people inconvenient to questionable businesses. While the unusual prominence of Golunov’s case could be seen as a watershed moments in efforts to draw attention to the issue, observers also said it was only the beginning of a long struggle.

“The case against Golunov is actually over,” wrote Maria Zheleznova, opinion editor of Vedomosti, one of the three papers that showed front-page support for Golunov. “But the case against the system in which such lawlessness became possible is just beginning, otherwise such cases will necessarily arise again and again.”