Mali's army says it killed around 40 jihadists after a fierce dawn raid on its base in central Mali, but the attackers claim they briefly seized the camp.

It was a violent start to Sunday in central Mali.

The authorities say their soldiers killed dozens of militant Islamists as they repelled a major attack on a military base in the town of San, about 400 kilometres north of the capital Bamako.

Footage and updates credited to cbinews.tv show the aftermath of the assault, which the army says lasted around two hours.

Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, better known as JNIM, a jihadist group affiliated to al-Qaeda, said it was behind the attack and claimed its fighters took control of the base.

The Malian army pushed back on that, admitting its troops had to retreat temporarily but insisting the camp never fell.

"The enemy was eliminated, and the attack was successfully repelled. Around 40 terrorists were eliminated," Lt Col El Oumrani, the commander of the 23rd regiment in the San garrison, said in a video.

He urged residents to remain vigilant and insisted his soldiers had "not gone anywhere", and the base remained under army control.

"The camp of the 23rd is not empty, it is under the custody of the army."

But witness accounts paint a more chaotic picture. According to reports monitored by cbinews.tv from French broadcaster RFI, the attack started at around 05:00 local time and lasted for about two hours. The attackers reportedly arrived on motorcycles and on foot, some disguised in army uniforms to infiltrate the base.

One resident said the militants entered the camp and held it "for a long time before leaving".

Another told RFI: "I noticed that the fighting took place between 200 and 300 metres from the camp. Several terrorists were killed by soldiers, but others fled; some even hid in houses, and others went into the forest."

Security and local sources quoted by AFP said at least 10 soldiers were killed and the assailants did briefly take over the camp. The army told national broadcaster ORTM that the militants used drones, heavy machine guns and armoured vehicles to breach the perimeter.

This is not an isolated incident. Mali's security situation appears to be deteriorating again, more than a decade after a jihadist insurgency first took root in the north in 2012 following a Tuareg rebellion.

JNIM was formed in 2017 from a merger of several Sahelian jihadist groups and has become al-Qaeda's most active affiliate in Africa. According to data tracked by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, JNIM has been responsible for more than half of all militant Islamist activity in the Sahel in the past two years.

While its heartland remains in northern Mali, the group has steadily diversified, pushing into central and southern Mali and increasingly into Burkina Faso and Niger. That expansion has allowed it to stage complex attacks deeper inside government-held territory despite repeated military operations.

April was particularly bloody. The country saw nationwide, coordinated attacks by an alliance of jihadists and separatist rebels in the north, the Azawad Liberation Front, which is seeking to overthrow the military regime of General Assimi Goita, who seized power in a coup in 2020.

During those attacks, Defence Minister Sadio Camara was reportedly killed in an apparent suicide truck bombing on his residence near Bamako.

Since the 2020 coup, which was in part justified by the failure to contain the insurgency, Mali has reshaped its alliances. Bamako expelled French forces from Operation Barkhane in 2022, ending nearly a decade of French counter terrorism operations, and turned instead to Russia, deploying fighters from the Wagner Group, now rebranded as Africa Corps.

Despite that shift, large swathes of the north and east remain outside government control, and the UN estimates that more than 400,000 people have been displaced by the conflict in Mali this year alone.

For now, San is back under army control, according to cbinews.tv, but the battle for central Mali is far from over.

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