On 20 November 2015, Islamist militants took 170 hostages and killed 20 of them in a mass shooting at the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, the capital city of Mali.[5][6][7] The siege was ended when Malian special forces, backed by U.S. and French personnel, launched an assault on the hotel to recover the surviving hostages.[8][9]Al-Mourabitoun claimed that it carried out the attack "in cooperation with" al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb; an al Qaeda member confirmed that the two groups cooperated in the attack.[10]