Newly elected President Mohamed Bazoum denounces ‘barbaric’ assaults within the border area close to Mali.
Attackers on motorbikes have raided a number of villages in southwestern Niger, killing at the very least 137 individuals within the bloodiest violence to hit the nation in years, the federal government mentioned.
The gunmen on Sunday attacked the villages of Intazayene, Bakorat and Wistane, situated close to the border with Mali, capturing “at every little thing which moved”, in line with a neighborhood official.
On Monday, the federal government mentioned the assaults had left 137 individuals useless. Native officers have beforehand given a dying toll of at the very least 60.
“In treating civilian populations systematically as targets now, these armed bandits have gone a step additional into horror and brutality,” authorities spokesman Zakaria Abdourahamane mentioned in a press release learn on public tv.
The coordinated raids underscore the best problem going through Mohamed Bazoum, Niger’s new president whose election victory in a runoff vote final month was confirmed on Sunday by the nation’s high courtroom.
Niger, the world’s poorest nation in line with the United Nations’ improvement rankings for 189 international locations, is combating armed campaigns which have spilled over from Mali and Nigeria, killing lots of of individuals and displacing practically half 1,000,000 others.
The three villages attacked on Sunday are situated within the arid Tahoua area, abutting the Tillaberi border space, a hotspot of the battle plaguing the western portion of the Sahel for a lot of the previous 10 and can be fuelled by fighters linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS).
On March 15, fighters killed 66 individuals within the Tillaberi area, attacking a bus carrying consumers from the market city of Banibangou, after which raided the village of Darey-Daye, killing inhabitants and torching grain shops. The identical day, an assault claimed by ISIL within the so-called “tri-border space”, the place the frontiers of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali converge, killed 33 Malian troopers.
“After the Banibangou bloodbath, yesterday the terrorists, in the identical barbaric approach, struck the peaceable civilian populations of Intazayene and Bakorat,” Bazoum mentioned in a Twitter put up on Monday, providing “heartfelt condolences to the victims’ kin”.
Bazoum, elected on February 21, is a former inside minister who was the popular successor and right-hand man of the outgoing President Mahamadou Issoufou.
He has pledged to battle insecurity and ordered military reinforcements to the Tillaberi area after the bloodletting of March 15.
Niger is a part of a France-backed alliance of nations within the Sahel area often called the G5. A contingent of 1,200 troopers from the Chadian military, thought-about the area’s hardest, has been deployed below the G5 banner.
On January 2, 100 individuals had been killed in assaults on two villages within the Mangaize district of Tillaberi. The bloodbath, one of many worst in Niger’s historical past, occurred between two rounds of the nation’s presidential election.
A 12 months earlier, on January 9, 2020, the Niger military misplaced 89 males in an assault on a navy camp in Chinegodar.
In December 2019, 71 Nigerien troopers had been killed in an assault in Inates within the Tillaberi area, and the next month 89 had been killed in an assault on their base at Chinedogar.