Cote d’Ivoire, which was recently targeted by two jihadist attacks in the north, illustrates the ambitions of armed Islamist groups based in the Sahel to extend their field of action to the Gulf of Guinea countries.
On the night of March 28, armed men attacked two Ivorian army positions in Kafolo and Kolobougou on the border with Burkina Faso. These simultaneous attacks resulted in six deaths and several injuries including three soldiers and three assailants. A little less than a year earlier, on June 11, 2020, a jihadist assault, the first in Cote d’Ivoire, killed a dozen Ivorian soldiers already in Kafolo.
The first of these new jihadist attacks on Ivorian territory took place in the same locality of Kafolo, near the town of Kong, in the north-west. The attack took place between midnight and 1am. Around 60 heavily armed men from Burkina Faso opened fire on an army outpost, killing two soldiers and wounding four.
In the fighting, the attackers lost three men. Four others were arrested, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Cote d’Ivoire, which noted that weapons, radio, ammunition and motorbikes had been seized.
The regular army repelled the attackers after an hour of intense fighting. This was followed by a military combing operation on the ground to search for the fleeing assailants and any accomplices.
The second attack occurred in Kolobougou, 60km northwest of the department of Tehini, bordering Burkina Faso, where a gendarmerie post was raided.
According to a note from the Ivorian armed forces headquarters, “one Ivorian gendarme was killed and another injured.” However, no casualties were recorded on the side of the perpetrators of the attack on this border post.
The assault on the gendarmerie post in Kolobougou took place between “2am and 3am,” a local source told APA, reporting that “the people are currently overcome by fear and cannot calmly go to their fields and go about their business.”
“The posts are under surveillance by the Ivorian army in the locality and the presence of the soldiers who have come as reinforcements had the local residents a little scared,” a resident of the region told APA.
A target of jihadist groups
“These attacks show that Cote d’Ivoire is clearly part of the terrorist groups’ expansionist project,” said Lacina Diarra, a security specialist in the Sahel-Sahara region. The jihadists “want to create a sanctuary in the border area between Burkina Faso, Mali and Cote d’Ivoire,” he explained, confirming a theory recently supported by the head of French foreign intelligence, Bernard Emié.
At a meeting on counter-terrorism held in early February at the Orleans airbase in France, the head of the DGSE’s 7,000 spies and analysts warned that it was necessary to prepare for both large-scale attacks and jihadist expansion towards Gulf countries such as Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire and Benin.
For many security experts, in order to be better prepared to counter such an eventuality, the Ivorian government must quickly “break the chain of recruitment and develop transnational strategies while involving communities and civil society.”
Operation “thick borders”
Following the first attack last year in Kafolo, the Ivorian government adopted a decree creating a “Northern Operational Zone” which extends to the regions located on the borders between Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Burkina Faso.
This NOZ aims to move from a border surveillance phase to a defensive posture with a significant capacity for reversion to an offensive mission in order to prevent any infiltration of these armed groups on Ivorian soil.
With a single command for military and territorial defence operations, the Ivorian state wants to enable all the defence and security forces to react quickly to missions at the borders.
The Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces, Lieutenant General Lassina Doumbia, on Monday 31 March, visited the troops, accompanied by the senior commander of the gendarmerie, Lieutenant General Apalo Toure. “I would like to congratulate you, tell you our encouragement, send you our condolences and tell you that you have been brave, given the circumstances and the efforts you have made, we can only acknowledge you,” General Doumbia told his troups in Kafolo.
“In my opinion, from my experience, in night combat when you are surprised, losing two men, is that you are good (soldiers), you know how to fight because at night, when you see someone passing, you do not know if it is his friend or his enemy. Among ourselves, we can turn on each other because it’s complicated,” he added.
For his part, the senior command of the gendarmerie, asked the soldiers to be poised because “you have to be ready to use your weapon,” he said.
AP/ls/te/lb/abj/APA