Sahel anti-terror force vows to fight on after suicide attack on headquarters
BAMAKO: A five-nation African anti-terror task force vowed Saturday to press on in its battle against jihadists, the day after a suicide attack on the outfit’s headquarters in Mali killed two soldiers and a civilian.
Friday’s attack was carried out by a bomber in a vehicle painted in UN colours who destroyed the building’s entrance wall.
It was the first attack on the headquarters of the G5 force, set up with the backing of France in 2017 to roll back jihadist insurgents and criminal groups in the vast, unstable Sahel region.
The Al-Qaeda-linked Support Group for Islam and Muslims, the main jihadist alliance in Africa’s Sahel region, claimed the attack in a telephone call to the Mauritanian news agency Al-Akhbar.
“The conditions of this force will improve. This shows our determination rather than an indication of any weakness,” Mauritanian Foreign Minister Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his Cameroonian counterpart Paul Biya on Friday condemned the attack and discussed the security situation in the Lake Chad area, the French leader’s office said Saturday.
The strike came three days before a meeting in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott between Macron and the heads of the G5 Sahel states to discuss progress made by the force.
The G5 Sahel aims to have a total of 5,000 troops from five nations – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger – but has faced funding problems.
It operates alongside France’s 4,000 troops in the troubled “triborder” area where Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso meet, and alongside the UN’s 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali.
In a telephone call on Friday, Macron and Biya discussed “the need to continue with regional cooperation in the fight against terrorist acts by the Boko Haram group,” the French statement said.
The strike in the Malian town of Sevare came shortly after Friday prayers, a military source in the G5 Sahel force told AFP. Governor Sidi Alassane Toure said four suspects had been arrested.
Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, in Sevare on Saturday, promised to “hunt down the terrorists” who carried out the attack, assuring it will not “deflect us from our objective.”
UN secretary general Antonio Guterres condemned “the complex attack perpetrated against the G5Sahel Joint Force’s Headquarters”, his spokesman said.
Guterres, who visited the Sevare headquarters last month, highlighted security shortcomings on several of the force’s sites in Mali in a report published in May.