Group loyal to IS claims responsibility for attack

Four American soldiers were killed on Oct. 4 in Niger

The New York Times

A group in northwestern Africa that is loyal to the Islamic State issued a statement on Friday claiming responsibility for the October attack in Niger that killed four American soldiers who were on patrol with Nigerian forces.

The statement offered no explanation for the delay in claiming responsibility for the Oct. 4 attack, which American officials had said was probably carried out by thegroup.

“We declare our responsibility for the attack on the U.S. commandos last October in the Tongo Tongo region of Niger,” said the statement, attributed to Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahraoui, who was a member of Al-Qaida’s regionalbranch before pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, nearlytwo years ago.

The statement was issued to reporters at the Nouakchott News Agency, a website in Mauritania to which fighters from Mr. Sahraoui’s group have previously sent missives.

The assault last fall was one of the most deadly recent attacks on American soldiers in Africa. In addition to the four Americans, including two members of the Green Berets, five Nigerien soldiers who were with them on a joint mission were killed.

Details of the attack remain murky, and members of the patrol have given conflicting accounts of it. It is unclear whether the patrol was simply ambushed, or whether it was attacked after thetroops were reassigned to support a separate, clandestine counterterrorism mission against Islamist militantsin the area.

Aid workers and tourists have long been urged to avoid the area where the attack occurred, near Niger’s border with Mali, because of the presence of both AlQaida-and Islamic State-affiliatedgroups.

In its statement sent to the website, Mr. Sahraoui’s group also claimed responsibility for an attack on a convoy of French troops in Mali on Thursday, which the French military said wounded three soldiers, accordingto Reuters.

The extent of Mr. Sahraoui’s ties with the Islamic State is unclear. The website in Mauritania that carried the group’s statement on Friday is an outlet favored by Mr. Sahraoui’s former colleagues in Al Qaeda, not by the Islamic State. The area in which Mr. Sahraoui’s group operates contains some of the most forbidding terrain on the planet, a landscape of undulating dunes where cellphone towers are few and far between.

“There is a lot we don’t know about how his operation connects back to the mother ship — what’s the connective tissue?” said Thomas Joscelyn, an analyst who has tracked the group for years as a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “There are a lot of possibilities and many factors in play.”

The remoteness of the areain which Mr. Sahraoui’s group operates, and the difficulty of getting reliable cellphone signals or internet access,could be one factor to explain the delay in releasing the statement. Another possibility is that the Islamic State’s media apparatus was disrupted after the group lost nearly 98 percent of its territoryin Iraq and Syria.

Additionally, there have beenreports of unrest among from Al-Qaida loyalists after Mr. Sahraoui made his pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State. “There were evenreports at one point that he was injured in a shootout withAl-Qaida,” Mr. Joscelyn said.

Mr. Sahraoui cut his teeth in Al Qaeda’s branch in the region, which reported to Osama bin Laden through letters that were carried across the desert by couriers. He joined the Al-Qaida branch some time in 2010, according to one account, and became a deputy to Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, one of AlQaida’s most notorious commanders in the area and among the first to discover that foreigners were lucrativebargaining chips.

He bankrolled his operations through kidnappings for ransom, pioneering a business model that was later adopted by the terrorist group in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistanand elsewhere.

By 2011, Mr. Sahraoui was in charge of taking care of foreign hostages kidnapped by the group, according to Mariasandra Mariani, an Italian who was held by him formore than a year after her abduction in Algeria on Feb. 2,2011.

He parted ways with AlQaida in 2012, after the jihadists seized most of northern Mali. He resurfaced as the spokesman of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad West Africa, a separate jihadist group based in Mali, which merged with a third group in 2013.

Then in May 2015, he swore loyalty to the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr alBaghdadi. But his video pledge was not released by the group’s news agency for more than a year, until October 2016. Since then, Mr. Sahraoui’s statements have not been promoted on ISIS media outlets, including Friday’s claim, which was sent to the Mauritanian website. The Islamic State affiliate operating in Nigeria regularly succeeds in uploading messages and photo essays through established ISIS media channels.

That lack of a consistent media presence may suggest that Mr. Sahraoui’s unit has not been fully accepted by the Islamic State, or else that the group has not managed to establish the logistical ties that have allowed other affiliates to post statements and videos of attacks on its platforms.

In Bangladesh in 2016, for example, a relatively new affiliate was able to send images of an attack on a restaurant to the Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency before members of the security forces broke down the doors and ended the siege.

Survivors later described how the attackers had demanded that employees turn on the restaurant’s wireless network so that they could send their images.