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. 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. 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.