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01-08-2025
LOME: A group affiliated with Al Qaeda has killed dozens of civilians and eight soldiers so far this year in Togo, the country’s foreign minister told media last week, in a rare official acknowledgement of the toll of rising attacks.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Dussey said 15 attacks in northern Togo had been perpetrated so far this year by Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), an insurgent group in West Africa’s Sahel region. He put the civilian death toll at 54.
Togo has seen a rise in jihadist activity in recent years, as groups linked to Islamic State and al Qaeda have spread from the Sahel.
A surge in attacks in May and June marked one of the deadliest periods in the Sahel’s recent history, underscoring the threat posed by jihadist groups at a time when regional governments are estranged from former Western military allies, analysts say. Violence in the region south of the Sahara started when jihadist groups hijacked a Tuareg rebellion in the north of Mali in 2012.
Groups linked to Al Qaeda and Islamic State have since seized territory despite costly military efforts to push them back, spreading into Burkina Faso and Niger and more recently into the north of coastal countries such as Togo.
Thousands have been killed and millions displaced by the fighting.
Dussey told media that there are about 8,000 Togolese forces in the north between Togo and neighboring Burkina Faso. Analysts say JNIM has been ramping up attacks in Burkina Faso. Dussey said Togo’s cooperation with Burkina Faso was very good, and said that Togo acts as a bridge between the Economic Community of West African States, of which it is a member, and the Confederation of Sahel States, consisting of military-ruled Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
Last month, at dawn on June 1, gunfire shattered the stillness of Mali’s military base in Boulkessi. Waves of jihadist insurgents from an al-Qaeda-linked group stormed the camp, catching newly deployed soldiers off guard.
Some troops, unfamiliar with the base, which lies near Mali’s southern border with Burkina Faso, scrambled to find cover while others fled into the arid brush, according to one soldier, who spoke to survivors of the attack.
The soldier, who had completed a tour at the camp a week before, requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.
Hours after the attack, videos circulated online showing jubilant fighters from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), stepping over the bodies of fallen soldiers.
JNIM claimed it had killed more than 100 troops and showed around 20 soldiers who said they were captured at the base. Media was unable to verify the claims independently.
The Boulkessi assault was one of more than a dozen deadly attacks by JNIM on military outposts and towns across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in May and June. The insurgents claimed to have killed more than 400 soldiers in those attacks. Mali’s military government has not commented on the toll.
Reuters spoke to five analysts, a security expert and a community leader in the region who said the surge in violence reflects a strategic shift by JNIM, a group founded by a veteran Islamist who rose to prominence by briefly seizing northern Mali in 2012.
JNIM is moving from rural guerrilla tactics to a campaign aimed at controlling territory around urban centres and asserting political dominance in the Sahel, they said.
“The recent attacks point a concrete effort to encircle Sahelian capitals, aiming for a parallel state stretching from western Mali to southern Niger and northern Benin,” said Mucahid Durmaz, senior Africa analyst at risk intelligence group Verisk Maplecroft. (Int’l News Desk)
