30 killed in armed raids near Niger-Nigeria border

Attackers killed 30 villagers last week in several raids in western Republic of Niger, near the Nigerian border, the governor of the Tahoua region said Monday on state radio.

While the assailants’ identities are unknown, Tahoua has suffered jihadist attacks and is also a stronghold of armed bandits operating between Niger and Nigeria.

“Thirty martyrs fell and at least 500 head of livestock were carried off” by the assailants in the series of attacks on Thursday, Tahoua’s governor Colonel Souleymane Amadou Moussa said.

He said the attackers “withdrew into a neighbouring country where their rear base is located”.

The wider Tahoua region is also known as a smugglers’ crossroads for fuel, drugs and counterfeit medicines.

The governor, who went to the site of the attacks Sunday, said the area was under the control of the security forces.

State radio reported that five people were also wounded and said that attackers on motorbikes had targeted three isolated villages in a mountainous area of the Birni N’Koni department, near the border with Nigeria.

The assailants came heavily armed on numerous motorbikes, killed at least 30 people and returned towards Nigeria,” a resident of Zata, one of the villages attacked, told a local radio station.

Spate of assaults

Last week’s attacks come after several soldiers were wounded in an attack on a military drone base at Tahoua airport in early March, which was repelled by the army, according to state media.

About a week earlier, a customs officer and at least three civilians had been killed in an assault on a checkpoint in the N’Koni department, which local sources blamed on “terrorists”.

According to conflict monitor ACLED, the Islamic State in the Sahel group has been claiming a spate of assaults in Tahoua, especially ambushes of the Nigerien army.

Despite a large military deployment, the junta ruling Niger since a 2023 coup has struggled to stem the violence that has hit several parts of the west African country since 2017.

In the west, near Burkina Faso and Mali, Niger is battling attacks by jihadists from IS in the Sahel and the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM).

In the southeast, Niger also faces violence from Boko Haram and their rival splinter faction, the Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP). Both are likewise active over the border in Nigeria, which has faced a jihadist insurgency for more than a decade and a half.

AFP