5, January 2020
Children among more than a dozen killed in Burkina Faso bombing, security sources say 0
Fourteen civilians, mostly schoolchildren, died Saturday when a roadside bomb blew up their bus in northwestern Burkina Faso, a security source told AFP.
Four people were seriously hurt in the blast in Sourou province near the Mali border, the source added, as children returned to school after holidays.
“The vehicle hit a homemade bomb on the Toeni-Tougan road,” a second security source said. “Most of the dead are schoolchildren.”
Meanwhile, the army reported an attack against gendarmes at Inata in the north on Friday, saying “a dozen terrorists were neutralised”.
Security sources said the bus was carrying high school students returning from the Christmas holiday
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack but jihadist violence in Burkina Faso has been blamed on militants linked to both Al-Qaeda and Islamic State groups.
The deaths came the week after 35 people, most of them women, were massacred in an attack on the northern city of Arbinda and seven Burkinabe troops were killed in a separate attack on their army base nearby.
Burkina Faso, bordering Mali and Niger, has seen frequent jihadist attacks which have left hundreds of people dead since the start of 2015 when Islamist extremist violence began to spread across the Sahel region.
The north of the country has been worst hit, with the capital Ouagadougou not immune to attacks.
In a televised address on Tuesday President Roch Marc Christian Kabore insisted that “victory” against “terrorism” was assured.
The entire Sahel region is fighting jihadist insurgency with help from Western countries, but has not managed to stem the bloodshed.
Five Sahel states – Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad – have joined forces to combat terrorism in the fragile region that lies between the Sahara and Atlantic.
Backed by former colonial power France, the G5 Sahel was created to great fanfare in 2014.
The centre piece of its strategy has been an initiative, launched in July 2017, to pool 5,000 troops from the five countries to wrench back control from ruthless jihadist groups.
But, hamstrung by insufficient funds, training and equipment, the force has only now reached a complement of 4,000 troops, and for many analysts seems to be losing the battle.
The nimble rebels have spread from Mali to Burkina Faso and Niger, as well as Chad.
Their hit-and-run raids are inflicting a mounting human, economic and political toll, sparking fears that the coastal countries to the south are next in line.
Since 2015, increasingly deadly Islamist attacks in Burkina have killed more than 750 people according to an AFP count, and forced 560,000 people from their homes according to UN figures.
(AFP)
5, January 2020
Iraq could ‘pay price’ for US strike on Iran commander 0
The killings of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani and a top Iraqi paramilitary chief in a US strike on Baghdad Friday threaten to drag Iraq into the abyss of regional conflict, analysts warned.
The US strike on Baghdad international airport targeted a convoy carrying Soleimani and his top Baghdad-based adviser Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq’s powerful Hashed al-Shaabi force.
The raid has confirmed the worst fears of many Iraqis: that their homeland will become the main battlefield in a looming conflict between Iran and the United States.
“Iran’s strongest cards are in Iraq, and I think that Iraq will pay the price for this,” said Fanar Haddad of Singapore University’s Middle East Institute.
Tensions between the United States and Iran have been rising for months, as the Washington accused Tehran-backed factions of firing rockets on their troops across Iraq and on their embassy in Baghdad.
But they have soared over the past week.
On December 27, a rocket attack killed a US contractor working in northern Iraq, prompting retaliatory US strikes that killed 25 fighters from Kataeb Hezbollah, a hardline Hashed faction.
Angry Hashed supporters laid siege to the US embassy as Washington announced hundreds of new US troops were en route to the region.
– Path to war? –
But Washington delivered its most decisive blow yet early Friday when a volley of strikes hit near Baghdad international airport, leaving two cars torched on the access highway.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards confirmed Soleimani was killed in the strike while the Hashed announced Muhandis’s death.
With the two dead, the Quds Force — the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Guards Corps — has been left decapitated and the Hashed lost its de facto chief, too.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed “severe revenge” for the raid and its top security council was meeting to discuss options.
Analysts said the outbreak of a wider conflict was looking increasingly likely.
“If Iran does need to respond and make a performance out of this, the fear is that there will be something more than just loading rockets at embassies,” said Haddad.
“It could set Iraq along the path of internal conflict and that’s something Iran can very easily instigate,” he said.
The nature of the strike is unpredecented because of the seniority of those targeted — making its repercussions hard to picture, said Ramzy Mardini, a researcher at the US Institute of Peace.
“The problem with judging what happens next is a problem of imagination. Nobody thought this was in the realm of possibility,” he told AFP.
“It’s likely that all actors on all sides will be playing things by ear in the short term, which is a recipe for miscalculation,” said Mardini.
– ‘Heads will roll’ –
Friday’s strike had shown that Iran could no longer use its allies in Iraq to carry out attacks against US interests “without risking an American conventional retaliation on Iran,” Mardini told AFP.
“Plausible deniability has gone out the window.”
The US had expressed increasing frustration with the escalating rocket attacks on its 5,200 troops in Iraq and on its embassy in Baghdad over the past two months.
US forces led the 2003 invasion against then-dictator Saddam Hussein and Washington has worked closely with Iraqi officials and commanders since then.
But its influence has waned compared with that of Iran, which carefully crafted personal ties with Iraqi politicians and armed factions, even during Saddam’s reign.
Soleimani was the prime example, sweeping into Baghdad regularly to hold meeting with top Iraqi officials during times of turmoil.
Ranj Alaaldin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Doha, said that would leave Iran with a range of questions for its Iraqi partners.
“How did the US know of Soleimani’s arrival in Baghdad? Who leaked the intel?” Alaaldin tweeted.
“Watch the Iraqi political space. Heads will roll.”
Source: AFP