French forces kill al-qaeda leader in Mali

FRANCE announced yesterday that it had killed a top military commander in alQaeda’s North Africa wing, striking a major blow against jihadists in the restive Sahel region.

Ba Ag Moussa, a former Malian army colonel, was a right-hand man of the leader of Mali’s most prominent jihadi group, Jama’at Nusrat al-islam wal-muslimin.

JNIM has been behind multiple attacks on soldiers and civilians in Mali and neighbouring Burkina Faso.

French defence minister Florence Parly hailed the “neutralisation” operation as “a major success in the fight against terrorism”. She added that Moussa was “one of the top military jihadists in Mali, in charge in particular of the training of new recruits”.

Surveillance drones helped identified Moussa’s truck in the Menaka region of eastern Mali, which was then targeted by helicopters and 15 French commandos.

All five in the truck were killed after they ignored warning shots and fired on the soldiers, said French military spokesman Col Frédéric Barbry. He described it as an act of “legitimate defence” and confirmed the bodies were handled “in conformity with international humanitarian law”.

The death of Moussa, considered a terrorist by the UN and Washington, is seen as potentially even more significant than that of Abdelmalek Droukdel, the leader of alQaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a rival jihadist group.

Mali is struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency that erupted in 2012 and has since claimed thousands of military and civilian lives. French and UN troops have failed to stop the conflict from engulfing the centre of the country and spreading to Burkina Faso and Niger.

A series of operations in recent weeks have resulted in soldiers from France’s 5,000- s t rong Operation Barkhane killing dozens of Islamist fighters in the Sahel region, which spans Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania and Niger.

France is now hoping to cut back its military presence to make room for a stronger European commitment, say security forces.

The announcement came on the fifth anniversary of the Bataclan terror attacks in Paris, on Nov 13 2015, in which 130 were people killed in the country’s worst peacetime atrocity.