The Collective of Residents of Northern Mali (COREN) on Wednesday held an extraordinary meeting with only one agenda dubbed "Setting our territory free and recovering our occupied regions."

COREN president Malick Alhousseini said this meeting was being held "at a very sad moment in our history, with our country occupied and our birth place in the hands of invaders and terrorists."

He said that since Sunday, Mali has been a country that is divided into two with the assailants terrorizing the localities by looting banks, administration offices and health centers.

Meanwhile, programmed assassinations, inhumane acts and a planned genocide was going on against the innocent civilians in the towns of Timbuktoo, Gao and Kidal, he said.

"The looting of our towns and villages is not just being done by those terrorists. It's also being done by some armed militia who were trained by our government, something that COREN has always denounced," Alhousseini said.

The meeting which brought together about 1,000 participants, was held at the Bamako International Conference Center.

During the meeting, the COREN members made a series of appeals to the state, the humanitarian organizations and the international community, each to play their role to ensure the restoration of normalcy in Mali's northern regions.

Ex-prime minister Ousmane Issoufi Maiga who attended the meeting said that in the coming two days, COREN will organize a big meeting at the Modibo Keita stadium and a minute of silence will be observed in memory of all those who have lost their lives.