ADF STAFF
Niger’s ruling junta took power in July 2023 promising to restore security to areas of the country ravaged by extremist violence. More than 18 months later, the situation has only worsened.
Attacks on Nigerien Soldiers and civilians in December left dozens dead and served as another reminder of how the junta led by Gen. Abdourahamane Tchiani is facing more serious challenges than the government it overthrew.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, extremists affiliated with Islamic State have killed about 1,600 civilians since the coup, compared to 770 before.
Meanwhile, al-Qaida affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) has increased its activity in the Tillaberi region of southwest Niger. The region shares borders with Burkina Faso and Mali, where junta leaders similarly are struggling to disrupt extremists after overthrowing their own democratically elected governments. JNIM has expanded its operations in Niger’s southern Dosso region, posing a potential threat to bordering areas of Benin and Nigeria.
Extremist groups riding motorcycles frequently attack convoys bringing food and commercial goods into the landlocked country from ports in Togo. Truck drivers wait weeks for Nigerien Soldiers to escort their convoys to the capital, Niamey. Terrorists use similar tactics against military convoys, allowing their fighters to attack quickly and escape just as quickly.
The United Nations has described recent attacks on Soldiers and civilians in Niger as featuring “extreme lethality.” Escalating violence in the Tillaberi region in particular puts both Soldiers and civilians at the mercy of terrorists. In November 2024, the Army reported that a dozen terrorists on motorcycles killed three workers who were part of a company building a dam on the Niger River near Kandadji. The shooters fled to Mali, where the government said it killed 10 in an airstrike.
In December, extremists killed 21 people in Libiri, another community in the Tillaberi. They looted residents’ possessions and burned their homes. Two days later, extremists killed another 18 people in the community of Kokorou.
Hadjara Zibo and her three daughters fled from their home in Libiri when the gunmen attacked.
“If they reached us, they could rape and kill us,” Zibo told The Guardian. In 2021, extremists attacked Libiri, killed Zibo’s husband and kidnapped some of the community’s women to serve as sex slaves.
“They kill men in front of the women,” Zibo said. “Women face horror and humiliation, and with no help from the junta, we are left at the mercy of the jihadists.”
In addition to civilian deaths, the Nigerien military is losing Soldiers to terrorist attacks as well. Terrorists killed at least 90 Soldiers and 50 civilians in two attacks on Chatoumane in the Tillaberi region, according to witnesses and the BBC. Witnesses reported that the attackers disguised themselves as civilians and opened fire at Soldiers on patrol in the community’s weekly market. The Soldiers did not return fire because of the risk of killing or injuring civilians.
Junta leaders claimed that just 10 people died in Chatoumane. They denounced the reports of more deaths as baseless and said they were intended to undermine military morale. The junta kicked the BBC out of the country soon after and banned the network’s French and Hausa broadcasts from Niger’s airwaves.
The ban on the BBC echoed the junta’s turn away from French and U.S. military support and toward mercenaries with Russia’s Africa Corps, formerly the Wagner Group. Since inviting Russian forces into the country, the junta’s actions have become more violent and less transparent, according to experts.
Rahmane Idrissa, a political scientist from Niger who teaches at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told The New York Times that the junta has only one approach to dealing with the extremists: “They don’t have a real strategy, except the use of sheer force.”
