Jihadists in ‘kamikaze vehicles’ attack military base in Niger and kill 71 troops
- Niger forces are fighting against Boko Haram militants on the southeast border with Nigeria and jihadists allied with Islamic State in the west near Mali and Libya
Islamist militants killed 71 soldiers in an attack on a remote military camp in Niger near the border with Mali, an army spokesman said, in the deadliest raid against the Nigerien military in living memory.
Jihadists with links to Islamic State and al-Qaeda have mounted increasingly lethal attacks across West Africa’s Sahel region this year despite the commitment of thousands of regional and foreign troops to counter them.
The violence has hit Mali and Burkina Faso the hardest, rendering large swathes of those countries ungovernable, but it has also spilled into Niger, which shares long and porous borders with its two neighbours.
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Several hundred militants attacked a base in the western Niger town of Inates over a period of three hours on Tuesday evening, army spokesman Colonel Boubacar Hassan said on state television.
It was in the same area where Islamic State’s West African branch killed nearly 50 Nigerien soldiers in two attacks in May and July.
“The combat (was) of a rare violence, combining artillery shells and the use of kamikaze vehicles by the enemy,” he said.
He added that another 12 soldiers were wounded and an unspecified number of others were missing, while a “significant number” of militants were also killed.
Two security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that 30 soldiers were still missing.
President Mahamadou Issoufou arrived in Niger on Wednesday evening after cutting short a visit to Egypt, his office said in a tweet.
No group had claimed responsibility for the attack.
The attack comes at the end of a year of intense violence in Inates, a cattle herding community near the banks of the Niger River 200km (130 miles) north of the capital Niamey.
Apart from raids on the army, jihadists looking to assert control have targeted civilians too, killing two village chiefs this year, according to two local sources.
Since July, hundreds of people have fled the area for the capital Niamey or other nearby towns, the sources said, leaving their cattle and houses untended and unguarded.
Security has deteriorated this year across the Sahel, a semi-arid strip of land beneath the Sahara, amid jihadist attacks and deadly ethnic reprisals between rival farming and herding communities.
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The region has been in crisis since 2012, when ethnic Tuareg rebels and loosely-aligned jihadists seized the northern two-thirds of Mali, forcing France to intervene the following year to beat them back.
But the jihadists have since regrouped and expanded their range of influence.
The rising body count this year has inflamed popular anger against regional governments and former colonial master France, which has 4,500 troops deployed across the Sahel.
Tuesday’s attack prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to postpone a meeting scheduled for next week in the southwestern French town of Pau, where he and five presidents from the Sahel were due to discuss security in the region. The meeting will now take place early next year.
Niger is part of a five-nation anti-jihadist task force known as the G5, set up in 2014 with Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and Chad.
Attacks continue, despite the 4,500 French troops deployed in the region as part of Operation Barkhane to help local forces.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
