Sat 06 June 2020:
France says it has killed the leader of al-Qaeda in north Africa, Abdelmalek Droukdel, in an operation in Mali.
Defence Minister Florence Parly said Droukdel along with members of his inner circle had been killed in the north of the country on Wednesday.
French forces had also captured a senior Islamic State group commander in Mali in an operation in May, she said.
The “daring operations” had dealt “severe blows to the terrorist groups”, she said.
“Our forces, in co-operation with their partners in the Sahel, will continue to hunt them relentlessly,” she said.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) emerged from a group started in the late 1990s by radical Algerian Islamists, who in 2007 pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.
The group has claimed responsibility for a string of attacks on troops and civilians across the Sahel, including a 2016 attack on an upmarket hotel and restaurant in Burkina Faso, which killed 30 people, mainly Westerners.
France has deployed more than 5,000 troops to combat jihadist groups in the region — a largely lawless expanse stretching over Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, where drugs and arms flow through porous borders.
His death, and that of other Al Qaeda figures, could leave the group disorganised in the Sahel.
Born in 1971 in a poor neighbourhood of Algiers, Droukdel took part in the founding in Algeria of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).
Abdelaziz Bouteflika, elected Algerian president in 1999, managed to convince most of the armed groups in the country to lay down their weapons.
The GSPC, however, refused to do so and Droukdel decided to approach Al-Qaeda.
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