The group believed to be behind the attack is also thought to have kidnapped the country’s opposition leader in March.
At least 24 Malian soldiers have been killed in an ambush near the border with Mauritania, in an apparent revenge attack for the assassination of a top jihadi leader.
The soldiers were patrolling close to the Wagadou forest, a known hideout for jihadist groups, on June 14.
An army spokesperson said that 8 soldiers had survived the assault. A further thirty-two on the patrol are missing.
Armed forces in the Sahel region are known to undercount the death toll of attacks to preserve troop morale.
One expert told The Telegraph that the attack was carried out by Katiba Macina, a jihadist group allied to Al Qaeda which has been wreaking havoc over large parts of central Mali.
Video shot at the scene apparently by the group showed a man wandering among dead bodies. At one point, he stops to roll up the shirt of a dead corporal and playfully slap him on the stomach.
Katiba Macina is also thought to behind the March kidnapping of Mali’s opposition leader, Soumaïla Cisse, in the country’s northern Timbuktu region.
The army ambush comes after gunmen killed two UN peacekeepers in the northwest of Mali on Saturday evening.
The two incidents may be revenge attacks for the death of Abdelmalek Droukdal, a top Al Qaeda chief in north and west Africa.
France announced they had killed Droukdal in northern Mali near the Algerian border earlier this month with the help of American intelligence.
Mali has been at the centre of a grim war spilling out across West Africa’s vast arid Sahel region since 2012.
Jihadist groups, some allied to Al Qaeda and Isil in the Middle East, are terrorising vast swathes of central and northern Mali, Burkina Faso and western Niger.
Thousands of local and international soldiers are struggling to hold back the wave of banditry and communal violence unleashed by the jihadists’ advance south. Last year, the conflict killed at least 4,000 people and displaced about a million in the three countries.
Britain is in the midst of what diplomats call a ‘pivot towards the Sahel’ and is planning on sending 250 troops to the UN’s beleaguered peacekeeping mission in Mali later this year.
Last week, jihadists killed at least ten soldiers in Ivory Coast near the border with Burkina Faso, in one of the clearest signs yet that the Sahelian conflict is spreading into the luscious Gulf of Guinea region.
In recent weeks, the Malian government have been under massive pressure from thousands of protestors angry at corruption and the government’s failure to stop the extremist groups.