French special forces and local troops raided an army base on Friday in northern Niger, ending a hostage seizure by Islamist fighters who had staged twin suicide bombings that killed at least 20 people.
The dawn raid came after Signatories in Blood, a jihadist group that claimed Thursday’s blasts, threatened to continue attacking Niger until the country withdraws its forces from neighboring Mali, where they are part of a French-led military campaign against Islamists.
A French defense ministry official said two “terrorists” had been killed in the raid on a building at the Agadez army base, where Islamist fighters had holed up after the bombings and were holding a group of trainee soldiers hostage.
Photo: AFP
An elected official in Agadez, the main city in Niger’s mostly desert north, gave a higher toll, saying three “terrorists” and three hostages had been killed, as well as a civilian caught in the crossfire.
French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed France had taken part in the raid.
“The situation has stabilized as we speak, especially in Agadez, where our special forces intervened to back the Niger forces,” he said on France’s BFMTV.
Signatories in Blood, founded by veteran Algerian jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, first grabbed worldwide attention in January when it seized an Algerian gas plant in a brazen attack that left 38 hostages dead.
Belmokhtar had been reported dead last month by Chadian President Idriss Deby, who said the one-eyed extremist had been killed in fighting with Chadian troops in northeastern Mali.
However, the jihadist group’s spokesman el-Hassen Ould Khalil was quoted as saying by a Mauritanian news agency that “it was Belmokhtar himself who supervised the operational plans” in the Niger attacks.
The group also warned of “further operations” in Niger and threatened France and other countries involved in what it called the “Crusader campaign” in Mali.
Thursday’s attack at the Agadez army base left 18 soldiers and one civilian dead, officials said.
French nuclear group Areva said a near-simultaneous suicide bombing at its majority-owned uranium mine in northern Arlit had killed one and injured 14 employees.
Adding to the differing death toll figures in Agadez since Thursday’s violence, Nigerien Defence Minister Mahamadou Karidjo, speaking on public radio, said a total of 24 troops and eight Islamist assailants had died in the fighting.
Areva president and chief executive officer Luc Oursel traveled to Niger on Friday to express his support for the victims and confirm the company’s commitment to the country.
“My visit here is a testament to the strength of our engagement in Niger,” he said in a statement.
An Areva employee said questions were still being asked as to how the attack could have happened considering “the impressive military and security apparatus” that was in place.
Meanwhile, Niger’s public television network broadcast images of the destruction at the military base, including pieces of the suicide bombers’ flesh strewn across the ground, debris from a four-by-four they blew up and roofs torn from buildings at the base.
Agadez residents said they were still reeling from the attacks, the first of their kind in the impoverished former French colony.
Signatories in Blood was the second group to claim the attacks.
The Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), one of three Islamist groups that seized northern Mali last year before French-led troops drove them out, also claimed responsibility on Thursday.
Signatories in Blood claimed the two groups had worked together and said Malian, Sudanese and Sahrawi or Western Saharan nationals had taken part.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the