Gunmen on motorbikes have reportedly shot dead 22 people, who were attending a baptism ceremony in an attack on a village in western Niger.
According to an AFP report, 15 people were killed at the ceremony in Tillabéri region, which borders Mali and Burkina Faso, before moving elsewhere and killing seven others.
“While people celebrated a baptism ceremony, gunmen opened fire, sowing death and terror,” said local civil rights activist Maikoul Zodi on social media.
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Over the years, Niger’s military government has struggled to deal with jihadist violence in the region, carried out by groups linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
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Local news outlet Elmaestro TV reported a “gruesome death toll of 22 innocent people cowardly killed in Niger without reason or justification”, in relation to the baptism ceremony.
Last week, Human Rights Watch said that since March, jihadist groups had raised the number of attacks in the country, summarily killing over 127 villagers and Muslim worshippers. Several homes have been looted and burned over the same period, the group stated.
To the group, authorities are to blame for not adequately responding to warnings of attacks and ignoring calls for help by villagers.
14 Nigerien soldiers were murdered in an ambush in the Tillabéri region last week. This was a figure that the army announced on Saturday in its weekly bulletin.
The army said after reports of a cattle theft by armed men, one of its units was deployed, yet the operation turned out to be “an ambush”.
Reports also indicate that it is mostly difficult to independently verify the real numbers of casualties in such attacks due to access restrictions and the fear of reprisals among witnesses and local media.
Since 2023, Niger has been under military control when Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani deposed the country’s elected President, Mohamed Bazoum.
Its neighbors, Burkina Faso and Mali, battling the same jihadist insurgency, are also ruled by military leaders but are struggling to deal with this matter.
According to the BBC, the three have expelled French and US forces that were previously heavily involved in the fight against jihadists that operate across the Sahel region.
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Besides scaling back their ties with the West, they have since formed an alliance to fight the jihadist threat, turning to Russia and Turkey for their security needs. Nonetheless, the violence still persists.
