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2019-12-12 Africa Subsaharan
Niger military camp attack leaves 'at least 60 dead' : Security source
[AlAhram] At least 60 people were killed in a holy warrior attack on a Niger military camp in the western Tillaberi region near the Mali border, a security source said on Wednesday.

"The faceless myrmidons bombarded the camp with shells and mortars. The explosions from ammunition and fuel were the cause of the heavy toll," the source said.

The source did not say which group was responsible for the attack on Tuesday. But Niger forces are fighting against Boko Haram
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
turbans in the southeast and jihadists allied with the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
group in the west near Mali.
The Jerusalem Post adds:
Islamist militants killed 71 soldiers in an attack on a remote military camp in Niger near the border with Mali, an army spokesman said on Wednesday, 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 neighbors.

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.

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 200 km (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.

TENSIONS WITH FRANCE
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.

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.

French President Emmanuel Macron, frustrated by mounting anti-French sentiment, has invited five West African leaders to a meeting next week. There he plans to ask them to clarify whether they want French troops to remain in their countries.

"We have no interest in this region other than for our own security," French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in an interview with Le Monde on Wednesday.

"If this doesn’t get resolved through accords and a clarification of commitments, we will have to ask ourselves questions and rethink our military positioning," he said. But he added that a withdrawal of French troops from the region was not on the table.
Posted by trailing wife 2019-12-12 00:04|| || Front Page|| [336100 views ]  Top
 File under: Islamic State 

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