BAMAKO, Mali — In a ransacked room on the third floor, a television set eerily broadcasted the France 24 news channel, where images of the attack were playing. In a room on the fourth floor, a half-eaten chicken sandwich sat next to a Turkish man’s passport on a bedside table. In an adjacent hallway, French troops serving with the United Nations stepped around drapes soaked with blood.

When gunmen stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, Friday morning and killed at least 19 people (reportedly now as many as 27), they struck at the heart of West Africa’s engagement with the rest of the world. The Radisson was Bamako’s best hotel and the identities of the victims represent a snapshot of who has stakes in the region’s fight against terrorism.

Three Chinese railway executives on a business trip concerning a $1.5 billion plan to upgrade colonial-era train tracks that connect landlocked Mali with a seaport in neighboring Dakar, Senegal, were killed. Among the dead were also six Russian employees of a freight airline company that services the French military and United Nations mission in Mali, an American development consultant, Anita Datar, and a Belgian parliamentary official, Geoffrey Dieudonné, as well as citizens of Israel, Mali and Senegal.

Businesspeople from India, along with Turkish Airlines and Air France staff were holed up for hours before Malian special forces came to their rescue. Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, took to Twitter to deny initial reports that he, too, had been among the hostages.