Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has reshuffled his government, bringing onboard a former rebel and eight other ministers as the country struggles with remnants of an Islamist insurgency in the north.
Nina Walett Intalou, a member of the ex-rebel CMA movement of the ethnic Tuareg in northern Mali, will take up the post of minister of tourism and artisanal crafts, according to a presidential statement issued on Friday.
Walett Intalou was previously first vice-president of the country's Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, created in 2014 with the mission to investigate violence committed in the north over the past five decades.
The new government of 34 ministers -- two more than the previous one -- will continue to be led by Prime Minister Modibo Keita.
The reshuffle will bring in eight other new ministers, including Mamadou Ismael Konate, a human-rights lawyer, who has been given the justice portolio, and Mohamed Ali Ag Ibrahim, in charge of the newly-created ministry of industrial development.
The ministers for the interior, foreign affairs and defence -- Abdoulaye Idrissa Maiga, Abdoulaye Diop and Tieman Hubert Coulibaly -- remain in their jobs.
Mali has been struggling to turn the page on an Islamist takeover of its northern territory in 2012 that triggered a French military intervention to pull the country back from the brink of collapse.
The UN peacekeeping mission there has become a target for attacks since its deployment in July 2013.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a signatory to the peace deal, has claimed responsibility for two recent attacks on peacekeepers in the northern city of Gao.
In response, the UN Security Council late last month decided to send 2,500 extra peacekeepers to Mali, authorizing the force to take "all necessary means" to deter attacks in what has become the UN's deadliest mission.
