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In an operation involving air and land badets, French troops killed several activists, including Yahia Abu Hamman.
Image: United Nations photo.
PARIS – French troops fighting Islamist militants in Mali have killed one of the main jihadists in the Sahel region, the French defense minister said on Friday.
Yahia Abu Hamman was the number two commander of the Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam Wal-Muslimin (JNIM), a group of insurgent coordination in the Sahara, in West Africa, linked to Al Qaeda. The group claimed responsibility for a series of attacks aimed at disrupting elections in Mali last July and more recent strikes in Burkina Faso.
"The dismissal of a prominent leader contributes to dismantling networks and disrupting terrorist activities in the region," Defense Minister Florence Parly said in a statement.
Soldiers belonging to the French Barkhane force and deployed in the Sahel identified Hamman during his trip in a convoy north of Timbuktu on 21 February, said Parly.
In an operation involving air and ground badets, French troops killed several activists, including Hamman, she added.
The violence exerted by Islamist militants has proliferated in recent years in the sparsely populated Sahel. Groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are using central and northern Mali as a launching pad for attacks in this largely desert region.
French forces intervened in Mali, a former French colony, with the support of the Bamako government in 2013, to isolate a Tuareg uprising that had erupted a year earlier. Some 4,500 French soldiers remain based in the Sahel, most of them in Mali.
The UN Security Council then deployed peacekeepers, who were the target of a concerted guerrilla campaign.
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