The vehicle in which the victims of Sunday’s attack in Niger were riding.
Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesJihadist militants on motorcycles killed six French nationals and their local guide and driver in a giraffe park in Niger on Sunday, according to government officials, the latest attack in a nation hailed by western nations as a bulwark against a rising tide of Islamist militancy across West Africa.
The ambush began shortly after 10 a.m., when the French nationals’ tour group entered the Kouré Giraffe Reserve, some 40 miles east of the capital, Niamey, according to senior interior ministry officials and the governor of Tillaberi region, Tidjani Ibrahim Katiella. At least one of the victims was beheaded by the militants, who swarmed the group on a dozen motorcycles, the interior ministry officials said
The foreign victims were expatriates working for the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development, or ACTED, a French nongovernmental organization, or NGO, the official said.
No immediate claim of responsibility was made, but several analysts said the attack bore the hallmarks of Islamic State and Al-Qaeda-aligned groups that have conducted dozens of strikes on civilian and military targets in the western and southern parts of the country. In 2017, Islamic State militants on motorcycles ambushed and killed four U.S. soldiers in the village of Tongo Tongo on Niger’s western border.
Niger’s government didn’t make an official statement, but officials said major roads in Kouré had been closed and military jets scrambled. An official in French President Emmanuel Macron’s office confirmed that French nationals had been killed in Niger, a country of 22 million on the southern edge of the Sahara, but didn’t confirm the number of deaths.
Over the past year, jihadist violence has mushroomed across the Sahel, the arid band of territory that stretches south of the Sahara. Almost 1,000 separate attacks were recorded in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and assembled by the Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies. In 2019, more than 900,000 people fled violence in the region, the Africa Center reported.
Niger has seen large attacks on military bases along its borders with Burkina Faso and Mali, but the areas around Niamey, the city of 1 million on the banks of the river Niger, were considered more secure.
Rida Lyammouri, a Senior Fellow at Policy Center for the New South, a Washington-based think tank, said that Kouré, the location of Sunday’s attack, wasn’t a known jihadist stronghold, but stressed that a recent government military offensive had pushed the militants away from their bases of operations in the so-called tri-state area on Niger’s borders.
“It was just a matter of time before they targeted this attractive and preferred destination for expats,” he said. Mr. Lyammouri added that a local Islamic State-linked group known as Islamic State in the Greater Sahara was known to operate closer to the area than the Al-Qaeda affiliate, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM.
Niger has in recent years become ground zero for a multibillion-dollar Western project to combat the expansion of jihadist activity across the Sahel. Western military forces operate from at least nine bases in the country, according to the government, which U.S. and European policy makers praised as a good counterterrorism partner.
The U.S. and France have boosted their intelligence-sharing in Niger, with the U.S. providing aerial surveillance from drones flying out of a new, $110 million base in the northern city of Agadez. French troops collect documents, computers and other intelligence during ground operations in Niger and other former colonies, then share it with the U.S., according to U.S. officials. The U.S. supported a French-led operation in June that killed Abdelmalek Droukdel, a senior al Qaeda commander in Africa blamed for scores of terrorist attacks and kidnappings.
But U.S. allies in the Sahel are increasingly worried that Washington’s commitment to the region is wavering.
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper is conducting a world-wide review of troop commitments, in keeping with the Trump administration’s strategic tilt away from dispersed actions against terror groups and toward great-power competition with China and Russia. Africa is the first region on his list, although an announcement, widely expected for months, has been delayed.
The Giraffe Park is a protected national reserve with dense vegetation. Hundreds of people visit each year to see its distinctive giraffes.
—Nick Kostov in Paris contributed to this article.
Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com
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