Mali’s defense minister, Gen. Sadio Camara, was among those killed in attacks carried out by Al Qaeda-linked militants across the country over the weekend, a ⁠government spokesman said on state television on Sunday.

The spokesman, Issa Ousmane Coulibaly, said a vehicle “laden with explosives and driven by a suicide attacker” had targeted General Camara’s residence, in the country’s military headquarters just outside the capital, Bamako. General Camara, he added, had engaged in a gunfight with the attackers before being fatally wounded.

In response to his death, Mali declared a two-day period of national mourning.

General Camara was a key figure in the 2020 coup that toppled the government of then-President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, amid discontent over the government’s failure to address corruption and growing violence of Islamist insurgents.

Under the current military government, led by Assimi Goïta, General Camara was Mali’s main point of contact with Russia, which provided security services for the junta first through the Wagner paramilitary group and then Africa Corps.

Mali has seen a major escalation of violence in recent years involving jihadist groups, the most powerful of which has lately become JNIM, the group that claimed credit for the weekend attacks alongside an ethnic minority separatist group.

JNIM, or Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, meaning “Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims” was established in 2017. Affiliated with al-Qaeda, it has sought to deepen its influence in West African countries like Mali and Burkina Faso, where it has instituted Islamic law in the areas under its control.

Despite its beginnings as a rural insurgency, JNIM has in recent years increasingly directed its attacks on urban centers, a sign of its growing political ambitions.

In the latest, highly-coordinated attacks, which took place simultaneously in multiple cities, the group used car bombs and armed drones

In a statement issued during the offensive, JNIM said it had captured the northern city of Kidal and the central city of Mopti, as well as military bases in nearby Sevaré and in Gao. It named the Azawad Liberation Front, an armed separatist movement of the Tuareg ethnic minority, as its partner in the attacks.

In an interview with the state broadcaster ORTM on Sunday, Maj. Gen. Oumar Diarra, the Malian military’s chief of general staff, said that more than 200 terrorists had been “neutralized” during counteroffensives against the insurgents, who he said were trying to disguise themselves by wearing military uniforms.

“Search and sweep operations are continuing in practically all areas and we are searching for them, pursuing them, and destroying them wherever they are found,” he said.