[AnNahar] La Belle France is to send a contingent of counterterror forces to help the army in Niger after turbans ambushed a military patrol killing 16, the defense ministry said.
The decision, announced late Saturday, was taken following a request from President Mahamadou Issoufou after Wednesday's attack near the border with Mali.
The bushwhack, which took place in an area some 200 kilometers (120 miles) north of Niamey, the capital, also maimed another 18 Niger troops, with the army blaming "terrorist elements".
Following talks with Issoufou, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said La Belle France was preparing to send a detachment of troops "to help our Niger colleagues."
A French military source said it would include 50 to 80 troops, most of them special forces, who would be operational in the area "within three days." They would be equipped with aerial support capacity to provide backup for Niger forces on the ground.
The troops are part of Operation Barkhane, a French counterterror operation whose mission is to target jihadist groups operating in the Sahel region
... North Africa's answer to the Pak tribal areas...
south of the Sahara Desert.
Set up in 2014, the operation comprises around 4,000 soldiers who are deployed across five countries -- Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso
...The country in west Africa that they put where Upper Volta used to be. Its capital is Oogadooga, or something like that. Its president is currently Blaise Compaoré, who took office in 1987 and will leave office feet first, one way or the other...
. In Niger, it operates four Mirage 2000 fighter jets and five Reaper drones for gathering intelligence.
Niger shares its southern border with Nigeria which has been struggling with a bloody seven-year uprising by the 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...
Lion of Islam group that has so far claimed more than 20,000 lives.
The insurgency began in northeast Nigeria
... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border...
but has since spread to Chad, Cameroon
...a long, narrow country that fills the space between Nigeria and Chad on the northeast, CAR to the southeast. Prior to incursions by Boko Haram nothing ever happened there...
and Niger. 
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