Assault on U.S. forces shows new dangers in region
BAMAKO, Mali — The Islamic militants came on motorcycles toting rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, killing four American service members after shattering the windows of the unarmored U.S. trucks.
In this remote corner of Niger, where the Americans and their local counterparts had been meeting with community leaders, residents say the men who came to kill that day had never been seen there before.
“The attackers spoke Arabic and Tamashek, and were lightskinned,” Baringay Aghali said by phone from the remote village of Tongo-Tongo.
Who were these men and how did they know the Americans would be there that day?
No extremist group has claimed responsibility for the deadly ambush on Oct. 4 and the languages reportedly spoken by the jihadists are used throughout the Sahel including Tamashek, spoken by ethnic Tuaregs.
The ambush of U.S. troops in Niger has been the center of controversy in America because President Trump has been criticized in some quarters, including by one grieving family directly, for the way he spoke to the wife of one of the soldiers slain in that operation.
The Niger attack appears to be the work of the Islamic State of the Sahel, a splinter group of extremists loyal to the Islamic State who are based just across the border in Mali, according to interviews with U.S. officials and authorities here in the vast Sahel region bordering the Sahara Desert. It is led by Adnan Abu Walid, who built ties with various extremists before forming his own group.
Some officials believe Walid’s militants are also holding an American, Jeffery Woodke, who was abducted in Niger a year ago. A rebel leader approached by Niger authorities to conduct negotiations for his release confirmed that Walid’s group is holding Woodke, who had spent 25 years as an aid worker in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world.
Now Walid’s group is suspected of the attack that killed four American soldiers this month.
The ambush in Niger highlights how extremist groups have shifted and rebranded since the 2013 French-led military operation ousted them from power in northern Mali. Those extremists lost Mali’s northern cities but regrouped in the desert, including the man suspected of ordering the attack on the Americans.
The 12,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali has become the most dangerous in the world as Islamic militants routinely attack U.N. convoys across the north.