The U.S. military says it has carried out an airstrike against the Islamic State group in Libya, the third U.S. airstrike in the North African country in a little over a week. These U.S. airstrikes over the last eight days are the first in Libya in over a year.
The US AFRICOM said in a statement that the strike was carried out by a drone based in neighboring Niger and it killed 17 militants in an unidentified location in southwest Libya.
The strike was the latest in a flurry of attacks in a largely ungoverned portion of the country. AFRICOM said that on Sept. 19, an airstrike killed eight ISIS fighters in a compound in Murzuq, Libya, nearly 600 miles south of Tripoli, the capital. Five days later, the military said it killed 11 more fighters in an airstrike in the same area.
The strikes are part of a larger plan to deny the ISIS militants a safe haven in the North African nation as well as ensure that it does not regroup to conduct attacks in the conflict-ridden country.
