Gunmen killed 37 civilians in a flashpoint region in western Niger where hundreds have died in extremist attacks this year, local sources said on Tuesday.
The perpetrators “arrived by motorcycle” in the village of Darey-Daye in the Tillaberi region on Monday afternoon as people were working in the fields, a local official said.
“The fee is very high – there were 37 dead, including four women and 13 children,” the source said.
A local journalist confirmed the charge and described the attack as “very bloody”.
“They found people in the fields and shot at everything that moved,” he said.
The deaths have led to an unofficial death toll from extremist attacks in western Niger to more than 450 since the beginning of the year. It is also the fifth attack in this area of Tillaberi in as many months, taking 151 lives.
Niger is ranked as the world’s poorest country by the UN Human Development Index and is located in the heart of the arid Sahel region of West Africa, which is fighting a nine-year-old extremist uprising.
The bloodshed began in northern Mali in 2012 and then spread to the center of the country before hitting neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso.
Tillaberi has borne the brunt of the crisis the most.
Darey-Daye, located 40 kilometers east of the city of Banibangou, was already crushed by a bloody attack on March 15.
Suspected extremists killed 66 people in attacks on the village and on vehicles of shoppers returning from the weekly market in Banibangou.
‘Wage war’
According to a toll issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday, more than 420 civilians have been killed in extremist attacks in Tillaberi and the neighboring region of Tahoua this year. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes.
“Armed extremist groups appear to be waging war against the civilian population in western Niger,” said Corinne Dufka, HRW’s Sahel chief, in the report.
Among those killed were village chiefs, imams, people with disabilities and “many children”, some executed after being plucked from their parents’ arms, HRW said.
The Banibangou branch is located in the so-called “tri-border” area where the borders of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali converge.
The area is notorious for attacks by highly mobile extremists linked to al-Qaeda and Daesh.
Three attacks by armed men on motorcycles were carried out in the Banibangou area on July 25 and 29 and on August 9, killing 48 people, according to authorities.
Atrocities have also been committed in south-eastern Niger by Nigerian extremists from Boko Haram and Daesh’s offshoots in the province of West Africa (ISWAP).
Meanwhile, authorities in northern Mali said hundreds of people had fled their homes a week after extremist attacks on the villages of Karou, Ouatagouna and Daoutegeft, near the border with Niger, left 42 dead.
“The terrorists ordered the population to leave their villages. Other civilians left out of fear,” a senior administrator in the area told AFP late Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In January, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said that the number of internally displaced people in the Sahel had exceeded 2 million. Another 850,000 people were refugees.
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