Gunmen killed 21 civilians in an attack on a goods convoy in western Niger near the borders with fellow conflict-wracked Sahel states Mali and Burkina Faso, local sources told AFP on Saturday.

The frontier lands between Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso have long been a hideout for jihadists linked to the Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda, who have waged a bloody insurgent war against the government.

“Twenty-one civilians were killed in this attack on transport vehicles on December 5 by armed men,” a local source said on condition of anonymity, with state radio confirming the attack by “armed bandits”, without giving a toll.
Another local source also reported 21 deaths in the same attack, without giving further details.

State broadcaster La Voix du Sahel said the convoy was heading back to Bankilare from a weekly market in Tera when it was intercepted by armed bandits in the early evening just north of the town.

“Several civilians (were) murdered in cold blood,” the radio bulletin added.
On Friday, the governor of the Tillaberi region, Colonel Maina Boukar, attended the funeral of the victims in Tera and “presented the condolences of the authorities” to their families, state radio also reported.

– Violent epicentre –

Tera, which has become the epicentre of jihadist violence in Niger, is an obligatory crossing point for the thousands of lorries carrying goods from Togo’s Atlantic port of Lome to landlocked Niger.

In late October, another freight convoy was targeted by assailants in a major assault.

“We have lost several of our comrades on this route, victims of increasingly frequent terrorist attacks,” Niger’s transport workers’ union said at the time.
In the past, the country’s drivers were able to take the safer route through to the ports of neighbouring Benin.
But since a diplomatic spat triggered by the July 2023 coup that overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president Mohamed Bazoum, “our country was forced to turn towards the port of Togo”, the transport union explained.

That has forced the truckers to divert their route through the high-risk areas of Burkina Faso and Niger, including near Tera.

Niger’s army, which is involved in two anti-jihadist operations in the Tillaberi region, sometimes reports attacks on convoys taking the overland route, which it claims are carried out by “terrorists”.

Near the borders with Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria, Niger’s far southeast also faces attacks from Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP) group.

According to monitoring group Acled, which records the victims of conflicts around the world, some 1,500 civilians and soldiers have died in jihadist attacks in Niger over the past year, compared with 650 between July 2022 and 2023.