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91 die as militant wreak havoc in Sahel region

ISLAMIC militants continue to wreak havoc in the Sahel region, where they have, in separate attacks, killed over 91 people, abducted school children, teachers and displaced thousands.

In separate recent incidents, the militants, linked to Al Qaeda and Islamic State, have launched attacks in Nigeria, Niger and Mali. 

MALI

On Tuesday, the militants ambushed an army convoy and killed 33 near the town of Tessit, in Mali’s northern Gao region, according to the Malian Defence Ministry.

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NIGERIA

On Monday, gunmen on motorbikes stormed a primary school in the northwestern Nigerian state of Kaduna and kidnapped three teachers but no children, a state official said after the fifth school abduction in three months.

It was the first attack on an elementary school in a wave of such attacks in which more than 700 people have been abducted since December.

Samuel Aruwan, Kaduna state’s commissioner for internal security, said in a press briefing that Rema Primary School, in the Birnin Gwari Local Government Area, was attacked at around 8:50am (0750 GMT) on Monday.

He said children fled as gunmen, referred to locally as bandits, entered the compound shortly after pupils arrived.

“This led to two pupils going missing. We are happy to inform you that the two missing pupils have been found,” Aruwan said. “We can also confirm that no single pupil was kidnapped from the school.

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“The government can confirm that three teachers… have been kidnapped.”

Nigeria’s kidnapping scourge began with the seizure of 270 girls from a school in the northeastern town of Chibok by the Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram in 2014. Around 100 of the schoolgirls have never been found.

NIGER 

On Monday, armed men in southwestern Niger killed at least 58 people when they intercepted a convoy returning from a weekly market and attacked a nearby village, the government said.

The attacks occurred in the Tillabery region, which is near the border with Mali and Burkina Faso and has seen increasingly deadly attacks by Islamist militants active across the region with links to Islamic State and al Qaeda.

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Suspected militants killed at least 100 civilians on Januarya 2 in raids on two villages in Tillabery, one of the deadliest episodes in the country’s recent history.

The assailants this time intercepted four vehicles transporting passengers from a weekly market to the villages of Chinagoder and Darey Dey, the government said in a statement on Tuesday.

“These individuals then gutlessly and cruelly proceeded to carry out targeted executions of passengers,” it said. “In the village of Darey Dey, they killed people and burned the granaries.”

The violence is part of a wider security crisis in West Africa’s Sahel region. Many of the militant attacks are concentrated where the borders of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso meet, a zone that a 5,000-strong French anti-militant task force has targeted heavily.

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Niger and its neighbours have also experienced tit-for-tat killings between rival ethnic communities, stoked by the militant violence and competition for scarce resources.

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By The African Mirror

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