Back to Blog
Video ambush niger american7/11/2023 ![]() The jihadists "have a speech that catches. This opportunistic model finds recruits within communities. The organization also capitalizes on a phenomenon of "peasant rebellion against States which have difficulty in fulfilling their security and social contract", underlines General Abou Tarka, president of the High Authority for the consolidation of peace in Niger. In the conquered territories, the populations must submit to the sharia and pay the "zakât", a tax levied in the name of Islam, in exchange for a form of protection. "The organization legitimizes the looting of rebellious communities, it mobilizes fighters from all over the region who are attracted by the loot, then they attack en masse and overwhelm the adversary", assures AFP a Malian military source. More than 30,000 displaced people have converged over the past year in the town of Ménaka, according to the UN. In the months that followed, its fighters "attacked dozens of villages and massacred large numbers of civilians in the vast regions of northeastern Mali (.) These attacks largely targeted the Daoussahak ethnic group", according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). In March 2022, the EIGS decreed a "fatwa" authorizing the blood of the Daoussahaks to be shed and their property to be seized. In 2018, fighting between the EIGS, set up as the protector of certain marginalized Fulani factions, and local armed groups partly composed of Daoussahaks, a tribe of Tuareg herders, degenerated into massacres of civilians by both sides. The rise of cross-border banditry and then jihadist groups in 2012 plunged pastoral communities in the region into a cycle of violence. ISGS fighters "prowl around 15 km from Ménaka and demand a passage tax for transporters connecting Ménaka to Niger or Gao while extorting cattle from communities", describes a UN source in the city.Ĭattle theft is one of the main sources of funding for the organization, which mainly recruits nomadic herders threatened by the development of agricultural crops in a region neglected by the central state. In Mali as in the northeast of Burkina Faso, the jihadists prefer to isolate the agglomerations and control the rural areas. "The population is traumatized, we can't get out of Ménaka, the road to Gao is blocked", worries a resident to AFP.Īn offensive on the city, however, seems unlikely. Only the regional capital Ménaka escapes them, secured by the Malian army, the UN blue helmets (Minusma) as well as armed groups. The fighting caused hundreds of civilian deaths, without it being possible to give their precise number as access to the area and to information is difficult.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |