By Tiemoko Diallo
BAMAKO, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Mali's army said on Sunday it had killed at least 12 Tuareg rebels in three days of clashes around a northern garrison besieged by the desert insurgents near the border with Algeria.
One government soldier was killed on Sunday when a column of army reinforcements heading for the garrison at Tin-Zaouatene in the remote northeast was ambushed by rebel fighters led by insurgent chief Ibrahima Bahanga, a senior officer said.
"The reinforcement mission which had left Kidal fell into an ambush this morning between Abebara and Tin-Zaouatene. There are five dead, one on our side and four on Bahanga's side," said the officer, who asked not to be named.
Since Friday, Bahanga's fighters have been besieging the garrison town of Tin-Zaouatene after a flurry of raids against military targets in recent weeks in what seems to be a limited revival of an earlier rebellion by the northern Tuaregs in the 1990s, both in Mali and neighbouring Niger.
The Malian officer said army mortar fire killed eight of Bahanga's fighters on Friday when Tin-Zaouatene's defenders fought off an attack. There were two further rebel assaults on Saturday, he added.
No independent confirmation of the casualties was immediately available.
The light-skinned desert nomads of Mali and Niger complain of being marginalised by black-dominated governments far to the south and they demand more official and military jobs, as well as a bigger share of the mineral wealth of their Saharan region.
Mali's government has appealed for international help and rushed army reinforcements north to counter the rebels, who on Wednesday fired on a U.S. military plane flying food supplies to the Tin-Zaouatene garrison.
The U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules was not badly damaged and returned safely to Bamako with its crew unhurt.
In neighbouring Niger, where a Tuareg rebel group has killed more than 40 soldiers this year and taken several dozen hostage, armed men seized a truck on Friday belonging to a French road construction company in the Agadez region, local officials said.
The rebel Tuareg-led Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) had earlier said it would halt attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan which began on Friday.
Officials in Mali and Niger, who dismiss the Tuareg rebels as bandit traffickers of arms and drugs, see links between the two new rebellions. But Niger's MNJ has denied any formal alliance with a Malian Tuareg group.
The United States has been training government soldiers from both Sahel countries in a regional trans-Sahara counterterrorism initiative which aims to reduce the threat of Islamic militants penetrating sub-Saharan Africa from the north. (Additional reporting by Abdoulaye Massalatchi in Niamey)
