DAKAR, Senegal — Armed groups in the north of Mali have, over the last week, attacked each other as well as United Nations peacekeepers and Malian soldiers — underscoring the country’s fragility as it tries to emerge from several years of political instability and jihadist revolt.

Hopes that a recent tenuous peace deal and cease-fire would pacify Mali’s restive, separatist-minded north have diminished as rival ethnic factions clashed in the town of Menaka on Monday; other fighters of the Tuareg ethnic group attacked government forces in the town of Léré on Wednesday; separatists attacked the town of Goundam; and United Nations vehicles were fired on in Timbuktu. The attacks resulted in the deaths of at least nine soldiers and several civilians.

Months of laborious negotiations in Algiers between the government and northern rebels produced a peace deal on March 1, but that is now in danger, diplomats say. Mongi Hamdi, the top representative of the United Nations in Mali — the agency maintains a peacekeeping operation of more than 10,000 soldiers in the country — called the episodes “extremely worrying because they are putting the peace process in jeopardy.”

Mali’s largely desert north is home to less than 10 percent of its population of 15 million but most of its problems. Separatist movements and lawlessness have characterized the region — neglected by the weak central government in the distant capital, Bamako — since the country’s independence from France. It was from the north that a Tuareg-jihadist rebellion emerged in early 2012, inflicting defeat upon defeat on the corruption-ridden army. The rebels eventually overran the entire region, imposing a harsh Qaeda-linked version of Islamic law that included amputations and execution by stoning.