Canadian peacekeepers were called upon to evacuate several wounded French soldiers in Mali earlier this month after their patrol was ambushed while hunting for militants along the border with Niger.
The previously unreported incident marks the first time the Canadians have been asked to help non-United Nations forces in Mali, where the French have been conducting counter-insurgency operations since 2014.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, the commander of Canada's task force in Mali said the UN and France have agreed to help each other in extreme circumstances and that his peacekeepers did their jobs by helping save lives. France has about 3,000 heavily armed soldiers in Mali and the surrounding region hunting militants linked to al-Qaida, the Islamic State and other extremist groups through what is known as Operation Barkhane.
The French counter-terror mission operates largely independently from the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, but Morehen says there is a good working relationship between the two. "So our pilots go over there and make sure that we have our flying procedures correct and we have a technical arrangement with them as well for medical support," Morehen said.Three Canadian helicopters were quickly deployed with approval from the UN mission commander in Bamako, Morehen said, and arrived at the scene about two hours later, at which point the fighting was over.
While he agreed that it was "the right thing to do," Walter Dorn, an expert on peacekeeping at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, said the evacuation nonetheless risked linking the UN and French missions in some minds.
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