Rebel leaders who backed Ivory Coast's President Alassane Ouattara have been charged over crimes committed during the country's post-election crisis in 2010-2011, sources said.

Until now only members of the former regime have faced justice over the five months of violence that left more than 3,000 people dead, drawing criticism from the opposition and civil society groups.

Malian soldiers killed three jihadis Wednesday during a search operation backed by Ivorian and United Nations troops at the site of an attack near its southern border, security sources said.

Public and police buildings were ransacked in the town of Fakola, 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Ivory Coast, on Sunday in an attack claimed by the Islamist militia Ansar Dine.

Jihadist group Ansar Dine on Tuesday claimed responsibility for two weekend attacks in Mali near the borders with Mauritania and Ivory Coast, and threatened to strike both countries.

Three soldiers and nine militants were killed on Saturday as a military camp came under attack in the town of Nara, according to the government, while public and police buildings were ransacked in Fakola on Sunday.

Heavy rains in Ivory Coast have killed at least 16 people so far in June in the economic capital Abidjan, including six this weekend, civil protection said Sunday.

The latest victims died in Attecoube and Adjame, two poor neighborhoods in the city, because of a landslide and a collapsing wall, civil protection chief General Fiacre Kili said.

More than 200 heavily-armed Ivorian farmers have seized a forest in Liberia, scattering terrified inhabitants in an incursion described in parliament as a "national threat", a security source and locals said Friday.

The security source, providing details of an occupation first raised in Liberia's senate earlier in the week, said the ethnic Mossi tribespeople were claiming the land for their country.

Armed men have crossed into Liberia from Ivory Coast and occupied an area of forest, spreading alarm in the remote border region, a lawmaker said on Wednesday.

The alleged incursion -- which could not immediately be independently verified -- would mark a worrying development in a campaign of violence by militants crossing in the other direction that has displaced thousands and claimed dozens of lives in the border area.

In February last year a gang of men with machetes ambushed two villages in western Ivory Coast, disemboweling a soldier and pulling out most of his organs before slaying three of his colleagues.

The attack marked the brutal resumption of a campaign of violence blamed on militants crossing from Liberia that has displaced thousands and claimed dozens of lives in the border area.

Ivory Coast politicians on Friday launched an opposition coalition ahead of October presidential elections as crowds chanted the name of ex-strongman Laurent Gbagbo, currently awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court.

More than 1,000 people, including political heavyweights, attended the launch at an Abidjan hotel, with the coalition's charter calling for Gbagbo to be freed along with others it labelled "political prisoners."

Four years after Alassane Ouattara took power in Ivory Coast amid post-election violence that left thousands dead, exiles who fought him tooth and nail yearn to return but fear bloody reprisals.

Hundreds of fighters once loyal to ousted ex-president Laurent Gbabgo have been refugees in Liberia since fleeing Abidjan and the far west, where long-simmering ethnic tensions exploded into massacres in 2011.

The International Criminal Court on Wednesday decided to combine the trials of former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo and his close ally Charles Ble Goude because their cases alleging post-election violence are nearly identical.

The court "granted the prosecutor's request to join the cases... in order to ensure the efficacy and expeditiousness of the proceedings," the Hague-based court said in a statement.