The raid about 150 km (90 miles) northwest of Mopti in Mali targeted the same forest area where France wrongly claimed last year it had killed Amadou Koufa,
| ...Salafist preacher and leader of the Macina Liberation Front, one of the local groups within Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Moslemin (JNIM), the regional umbrella affiliated with Al Qaeda in North Africa. MLF draws from the cattle-herding Fulani tribe extant in Mali, Niger, and Nigeria, which appeared in 2015 for the purpose of jihading against the farming tribes of Dogon and Bambara... |
A spokesman for the French army’s chief of staff declined to say at this stage whether Koufa was the target this time.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced the operation in a speech to the French community in Ivory Coast’s main city of Abidjan, describing it as a major success.
"This morning ... we were able to neutralize 33 terrorists, take one prisoner and free two Malian gendarmes who had been held hostage," Macron said, a day after visiting French troops stationed in Ivory Coast.
In Saturday’s raid, soldiers aboard Tiger attack helicopters used a Reaper drone to guide them to the forest area where Koufa’s group Katiba Macina operates, French army command said.
Koufa is one of the top deputies to Iyad Ag Ghali, the leader of Mali’s most prominent jihadi group, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), which has repeatedly attacked soldiers and civilians in Mali and neighboring Burkina Faso.
The United Nations, France and the United States have poured billions of dollars into stabilizing the Sahel, an arid region of West Africa south of the Sahara desert, but with little success.
France, the former colonial power in a number of West African countries, has more than 4,000 soldiers in the region in its counter-terrorism taskforce Operation Barkhane. The United Nations has a 13,000-strong peacekeeping operation in Mali.
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