IS affiliate claims attack on US troops
DAKAR: A group in northwestern Africa that is loyal to the Islamic State (IS) issued a statement Friday claiming responsibility for the October attack in Niger that killed four US soldiers who were on patrol with Nigerien forces.
The statement offered no explanation for the delay in claiming responsibility for the Oct 4 attack, which US officials had said was probably carried out by the group.
“We declare our responsibility for the attack on the US 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-Qaeda’s regional branch before pledging allegiance to the Islamic State nearly two years ago.
The statement was issued to reporters at the Nouakchott News Agency, a website in Mauritania to which fighters from the Sahraoui group have previously sent missives.
The assault last autumn was one of the most deadly recent attacks on US 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 the troops were reassigned to support a separate, clandestine counterterrorism mission against Islamic militants in 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 al-Qaedaand IS-affiliated groups.
In its statement sent to the website, the 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, according to Reuters.
The extent of the group’s ties with the Islamic State is unclear. The website in Mauritania that carried the group’s statement Friday is an outlet favoured by Mr Sahraoui’s former colleagues in alQaeda, not by the IS.
The area in which the 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 area in which the Sahraoui 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 IS’s media apparatus was disrupted after the group lost nearly 98% of its territory in Iraq and Syria.
Additionally, there have been reports of unrest among from al-Qaeda loyalists after Mr Sahraoui made his pledge of allegiance to the IS. “There were even reports at one point that he was injured in a shootout with al-Qaeda,” 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 Qaeda branch sometime in 2010, according to one account, and became a deputy to Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, one of al-Qarda’s most notorious commanders in the area and among the first to discover that foreigners were lucrative bargaining chips. He bankrolled his operations through kidnappings for ransom, pioneering a business model that was later adopted by the terrorist group in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and 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 for more than a year after her abduction in Algeria on Feb 2, 2011.