MSF Providing Medical Aid in Northern Mali

January 25, 2013

Mali, Africa, updated January, 2013

As the conflict continues in northern Mali, medical aid teams are helping civilians who’ve been displaced. Doctors Without Borders says it’s providing primary health care in some regions, while dispatching mobile medical units to others.

Doctors Without Borders – also known by the French acronym MSF -- says it’s providing care and treatment in Mopti, Gao, Douentza and Timbuktu. It’s also managed to get a team to Konna this week. The town’s about 70 miles north of Mopti and the scene of recent heavy fighting.

“All the teams are running hospitals and supporting activity for the civilians. It’s quite difficult to know where we are going in this moment. We are keeping our teams in all those locations for the moment and still trying to run the hospitals and the clinics,” said Rosa Crestani, the group’s emergency coordinator for intervention in Mali.

She said, so far, medical teams have only seen a few civilians actually wounded in the fighting between the French-led intervention force and the militias.

“But we are really concerned about their situation because the movement – not only for our teams, but for the civilians in this area – is still very dangerous. Since last Sunday, we are receiving in Fassala, the entry point in Mauritania, several hundred new refugees from Mali. We are running a camp in M’bera. That is the camp in Mauritania. There were already 55,000, more or less, refugees since last year. And now, for example, in the last three days there are around 1,000 new arrivals a day,” she said.