"Thank God for survival." When Nawma shared what he had been through, he would often thank the heavens for sparing his life, unlike the five men who were slaughtered before his eyes by mercenaries from the Russian Wagner group, on July 31, 2024.

That day, these fighters, deployed by the Malian army as auxiliaries, made another sweep through his village, Toulé, in central Mali. They were searching for jihadists, or people suspected of collaborating with them. Nawma, an imposing grocer in his fifties, a member of the Fulani ethnic group and a father of eight, had sworn that he had no connections to them. Nevertheless, he was arrested in his small shop, and taken to the mercenaries' camp near the town of Nampala, located about 15 kilometers away.

Once there, he was led to a concrete building where other prisoners were being held. He was stripped naked and detained in a shower stall, and repeatedly taken out for interrogation and torture. His captors would stuff a cloth in his mouth and soak it with water until he lost consciousness. They would place a chair on his body as he lay on the ground and sit on it. They burned the skin on his hip with a lighter.

"They also beat me on the head until I passed out. I lost a lot of blood," he said, pointing to a scar on his forehead. After four days, he was finally released, with no further explanation, and was left deeply scarred by what he had endured.

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