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26-04-2025
COTONOU: Suspected jihadist insurgents killed 54 troops in an attack last week on military posts in a Benin national park, the government said Wednesday.
Government spokesman Wilfried Leandre Houngbedji gave the new toll to a press briefing on the April 17 attack in the W national park in northern Benin, close to the frontiers with Burkina Faso and Niger. Authorities had previously said eight soldiers were killed.
This is the heaviest official toll since the start of jihadist attacks in the north.
The attack was claimed by the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM or JNIM in Arabic) which is affiliated with al Qaeda. It had said 70 Beninese soldiers were killed.
“Even if it’s not the 70 … it’s a lot,” the government spokesman acknowledged.
“The soldiers who have fallen are our children, our parents, our friends,” he said.
The country deployed nearly 3,000 soldiers to secure its borders in January 2022. It later sent an additional 5,000 troops to bolster security in the north.
28 Benin soldiers were killed near the border between Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso in January in an attack also claimed by the GSIM.
Earlier, Al Qaeda affiliate JNIM said it killed 70 soldiers in raids on two military posts in north Benin, the biggest death count claimed by jihadists in the country in over a decade of activity in West Africa, the SITE Intelligence Group said on Saturday.
The West African state and its coastal neighbour Togo have suffered a series of attacks in recent years as groups linked to Islamic State and al Qaeda have expanded their presence beyond the Sahel region to the north.
Media could not immediately confirm the report independently.
Benin’s army spokesman Ebenezer Honfoga did not respond to calls and messages.
SITE quoted a statement by Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) on Thursday saying 70 soldiers were killed in attacks on two military posts in Benin’s northeastern Kandi province in the Alibori department, more than 500 km (300 miles) from the capital Cotonou.
US group SITE tracks online content from militant groups.
The Sahel insurgency took root after a Tuareg rebellion in north Mali in 2012 and spread into neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger before reaching the north of coastal West African countries such as Benin more recently.
Thousands have been killed and millions displaced by the conflict, which contributed to spurring five military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger between 2020 and 2023.
Military authorities cut ties with traditional Western allies such as France and the US after the coups and turned to Russia to help in fighting jihadist activity.
Last month, The Sahel region of Africa is the “epicentre of global terrorism” and now, for the first time, accounts for “over half of all terrorism-related deaths”, according to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI).
Its new report says that in this semi-arid area to the south of the Sahara Desert 3,885 people out of a worldwide total of 7,555 died.
The GTI report adds that while the global figure has declined from a peak of 11,000 in 2015 the figure for the Sahel has increased nearly tenfold since 2019, as extremist and insurgent groups “continue to shift their focus” towards the region.
The index is published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think-tank dedicated to researching global peace and conflict.
It defines terrorism as the “threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation”. (Int’l News Desk)
