At Least 27 Dead as Gunmen Seize Over 100 Hostage at Mali Hotel, Qaida-linked Group Claims Attack
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/November 20/15/
Jihadist gunmen stormed a luxury hotel in Mali’s capital Friday, firing automatic weapons and seizing more than 100 guests and staff in a hostage-taking that left at least 27 people dead. Special forces staged a dramatic floor-by-floor rescue at the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, according to local television and security sources, to end the nine-hour siege. The assault added to fears over the global jihadist threat a week after the Paris massacre that left 130 people dead. The Qaida-linked jihadist group al-Murabitoun claimed responsibility for the attack. “We the Murabitoun, with the participation of our brothers from Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, claim the hostage-taking operation at the Radisson hotel,” said a man’s voice in an audio recording broadcast by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television. Al-Murabitoun, headed by Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was founded in 2013 and presents itself as the West African branch of al-Qaida. Al-Murabitoun was born of the fusion of Belmokhtar’s al-Qaida breakaway group “Signatories in Blood” and MUJAO, one of the jihadist groups that seized northern Mali in early 2012. “Signatories in Blood” allegedly masterminded the January 2013 siege of an Algerian gas plant in which around 40 hostages, mainly Westerners, were killed. Malian television broadcast chaotic scenes from inside the hotel as police and other security personnel ushered bewildered guests along corridors and across the main lobby. Malian security sources said at least 27 hostages had been killed, adding that French special forces had been “participating in operations alongside Malians.””The hostage-taking is over. We are in the process of securing the hotel,” a Malian military source said, as civil protection officers removed the victims in orange body bags. Two U.S. special forces troops who happened to be at the nearby U.S. embassy for meetings assisted in the rescue of six Americans. France’s defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said several countries had long been searching for Belmokhtar. “He is likely behind this attack although we are not completely certain of it,” Le Drian told France’s TF1 television channel. The palatial 190-room Radisson, regarded as one of west Africa’s best hotels, attracts entrepreneurs, tourists and government officials from across the world with its luxury spa, outdoor pool and conference suites. Witnesses talked of around a dozen armed assailants, but the Malian military source reported the deaths of three “terrorists who were shot or blew themselves up”, adding that the total number of gunmen was not more than four.
Waving in desperation
A paramedic said three security guards had been wounded while an AFP correspondent saw a police officer, who had been shot, being evacuated by security forces. An AFP photographer saw a white man appear several times at a window on the second floor, apparently appealing for help. A Chinese tourist quoted by the state-run Xinhua news agency said the “smell of smoke spread through the corridors and rooms” and that the internet was down.The men are believed to have entered the hotel around 0700 GMT at the same time as a car with diplomatic plates, with many guests still in their rooms. The nationalities of the victims have not yet been revealed, although a Belgian regional assembly official, in Mali for a convention, was among those killed, his parliament said. India said 20 of its nationals were freed while Xinhua said at least seven Chinese were involved. Twelve Air France employees were in a “safe place”, the company announced, while seven Turkish Airlines crew members, seven Algerians and two Germans were also freed. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon led international condemnation of the “horrific terrorist attack” suggesting the violence was aimed at destroying peace efforts in the country.
Security questions
Malian soldiers, police and special forces were at the scene soon after the attack began, along with members of the U.N.’s MINUSMA peacekeeping force in Mali and French troops deployed in west Africa under Operation Barkhane. Paris said before the rescue it was sending around 40 officers from an elite French unit of paramilitary police specialized in hostage situations. France has more than 1,000 troops in its former colony, a key battleground of the Barkhane counter-terror mission spanning five countries in Africa’s restive Sahel region. Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, who was in Chad for a summit of regional leaders, cut short his trip to fly home. Questions were raised over security at the hotel, with one regular guest, a French consultant, telling AFP that cars entering the compound were not always properly searched. The attack follows a hotel siege in August in the central Mali town of Sevare in which five U.N. workers were killed along with four soldiers and four attackers. Five people, including a French citizen and a Belgian, were also killed in an assault on a Bamako restaurant in March, the first such incident in the capital targeting Westerners. The north fell under the control of Tuareg rebels and jihadist groups linked to al-Qaida in mid-2012. The Islamists sidelined the Tuareg to take sole control but were largely ousted by a French-led military operation in January 2013. Large swathes of Mali remain lawless despite a June peace deal between the former Tuareg rebels and rival pro-government armed groups.
IS Claims Deadly Attacks on Yemen Barracks with Army Blaming Qaida
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/November 20/15/
The jihadist Islamic State group claimed responsibility for attacks on the army in southeast Yemen on Friday, after the military had blamed al-Qaida for the assaults that cost dozens of lives. IS said in a statement, quoted by SITE monitoring group, that 50 Yemeni troops were killed in multi-pronged attacks including a suicide bombing and clashes in Hadramawt province. The Yemeni army earlier said al-Qaida had launched the attacks on army positions near the town of Shibam, and that 12 soldiers and 19 jihadists were killed. Medics later said the army lost 15 men and that several civilians were wounded. Hadramawt province is a stronghold of al-Qaida whose militants control its capital Mukalla. The IS group is also present in Yemen feeding on chaos in the country where a Saudi-led Arab coalition has been battling Iran-backed Shiite Huthi rebels opposed to the government.
Both al-Qaida and IS are visibly present in Yemen’s second city Aden, where the Saudi-backed government has set up a temporary headquarters after the Huthis took over the capital Sanaa. On October 6, the temporary headquarters came under attack in a series of bombings that lightly wounded several ministers and killed 15 people. IS claimed the bombings which also hit military installations used by coalition troops. In its latest claim, IS said its operation on Friday targeted “three barracks of the apostate Yemeni army” on a road near Shibam in Hadramawt, SITE reported. IS said its fighters seized the barracks, killing or wounding those inside and that later a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-packed car into army reinforcements sent to the area. The statement claimed that in all 50 soldiers were killed and said that clashes with Yemeni troops were still underway.
– ‘Manhattan of the Desert’ –
The army and local officials earlier blamed Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) for the attacks. The main assault was staged at the western entrance to Shibam, known as the “Manhattan of the Desert” and listed as a UNESCO world heritage site for its high-rise mud-brick buildings, the army said. Local officials said fierce clashes broke out after jihadists exploded a roadside bomb targeting an army patrol, while a suicide bomber blew up a car at an army post near a residential area. “The blast damaged many homes, wounding several civilians,” a medical source said in the nearby town of Seiyun, where the casualties and the bodies of the dead soldiers were transported. Among the first bloody attacks that IS claimed in Yemen were a series of bombings against Shiite mosques in Sanaa in March that killed 142 people.The jihadist Sunni Muslim IS considers Shiites as heretics. Taking advantage of Huthi advances in northern and southern Yemen and the collapse of central authority, al-Qaida seized control in April of the port city of Mukalla. For its part, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, has imposed a strict version of sharia Islamic law in areas of Yemen under its control. The group has executed or lashed those it accused of “crimes” including homosexuality and sorcery. Those accused of theft have their hands cut off.
Nigeria’s Boko Haram kills 49 in suicide bombings
AP, Nigeria Thursday, 19 November 2015/
The suicide bomber exploded as truckers were tucking into dinner at the bustling marketplace where vendors urged them to buy sugar cane. At least 34 people were killed and another 80 wounded in Yola, a town packed with refugees from Nigeria’s Islamic uprising, emergency officials said Wednesday. Later Wednesday, two more suicide bombers killed at least 15 people in the northern city of Kano and injured 53, according to police. Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency said more than 100 were wounded. The blasts were the latest by Boko Haram, Nigeria’s home-grown extremists whose 6-year insurgency has killed 20,000 and forced 2.3 million to flee their homes. Boko Haram was named Wednesday as the world’s most deadly extremist group in the Global Terrorism Index. Deaths attributed to Boko Haram increased by 317 percent in 2014 to 6,644 compared to 6,073 blamed on the Islamic State group. Boko Haram pledged allegiance to IS in March and calls itself that group’s West Africa Province.
Wednesday’s explosions came as President Muhammadu Buhari pressed his campaign against Nigeria’s endemic corruption, blamed for hampering the fight against the insurgents. Buhari accused his predecessor’s national security adviser of stealing billions of dollars meant to buy weapons to fight Boko Haram, when soldiers had just a few bullets and the Islamic extremists were rampaging across northeast Nigeria. Critics long have blamed corruption for the military’s failures, asking how the insurgents can be better armed than Nigerian soldiers despite an annual defense budget of more than $5 billion, supplemented last year by a loan of $1 billion. Buhari ordered the arrests of several former high-ranking officials allegedly linked to fraudulent and fictitious arms contracts totaling $5.4 billion, one of his advisers, Femi Adesina, said in a statement. “Thousands of needless Nigerian deaths would have been avoided” if the money had been properly spent, Adesina said.
The unending violence has torn apart Nigeria’s northeast. In the city of Yola, hit by a suicide bombing for the third time in as many months, relatives searching for missing loved ones converged on the two main hospitals. “I couldn’t find them at the hospital so I had to come to the mortuary,” said a distraught Musa Adamu. He said his brother, Kamal, was selling sugar cane to truckers and his uncle had gone to look for him. Adamu found both their bodies in the morgue. Eight children were among the dead, said Yola Specialist Hospital director Dr. Bala Sa’id. State Department spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. condemns the bombings and renews its commitment to work with Nigeria and its neighbors to defeat Boko Haram and to address violent extremism in the region.“We denounce the callous terrorist acts that have taken place repeatedly in Nigeria and other countries in the Lake Chad Basin and offer our condolences to the victims and their families,” he said. “Of course, those responsible for these crimes must be held accountable.”Many Nigerians welcomed the order for the arrest of Sambo Dasuki, the former national security adviser accused of diverting billions that should have equipped the army.“Beyond corruption, Dasuki should be charged for high treason: Men, women and children died because their armed forces could not defend them,” one angry Nigerian, D. Olusegun, tweeted. Buhari ordered the arrest of Dasuki, a key adviser to former President Goodluck Jonathan from 2012, and other unnamed high-ranking officials mentioned in an interim report by a committee investigating arms procurement since 2007 that Buhari ordered after he took office in May. Dasuki is accused of awarding “phantom contracts” to buy 12 helicopters, four fighter jets and munitions worth $2.9 billion that never were supplied, Adesina said. Buhari fired him in July. In a statement, Dasuki said the allegations were “laughable” and that “I am not a thief or treasury looter as being portrayed.”He said he has a November 2015 memo from the then chief of air staff acknowledging receipt of the jets and helicopters.An October memo confirmed receipt of 250 kilograms of bombs and accessories costing $2.89 million with freight costs of $1.2 million, Dasuki said. “It is not for me to go and find out whether the equipment was delivered or not. I am not the one keeping the inventories,” he said.Dasuki insisted the presidential committee had never asked him to give evidence, though Nigeria’s intelligence agency, the State Security Service, has said that Dasuki refused to answer the committee’s questions.
Security agents said that was why they have been besieging Dasuki’s home in Abuja, the capital, despite a Federal High Court order allowing him to travel abroad for medical care. The court had allowed Dasuki bail after he pleaded innocent to other charges of money-laundering, involving more than $423,000 found in cash, and illegal possession of arms seized at two of his homes. Dasuki said he was proud that in the final months under his watch Nigeria’s military ousted Boko Haram from its self-declared Islamic caliphate. That offensive came as Jonathan faced elections. In the year before, soldiers fled before the extremists, allowing them to seize control of a large swath of northeast Nigeria. Soldiers told The Associated Press they were going into battle without food and armed with just 30 bullets each. Dasuki, 60, had usurped the role of the Ministry of Defense in procuring weapons. A retired army lieutenant-colonel, Dasuki participated in every coup in Nigeria since the 1980s.
