France has announced that its troops killed the head of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), who was wanted for deadly attacks on US soldiers and foreign aid workers. The neutralization was announced by President Emmanuel Macron; who said that Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi was eliminated by French troops of the Barkhane force.
Al-Sahrawi was killed in an airstrike in the Sahel region and his death is a significant CT gain seeing as his influence over the Jihadist movements in the region was huge. There was a $5m reward for information on his whereabouts as he was wanted over an October 4, 2017 attack in Niger that killed four US Special Forces and four Niger troops.
Al-Sahrawi was born in the disputed territory of Western Sahara in 1973 and had been a member of the Polisario Front which is fighting for independence from Morocco before he joined al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and co-led Mujao, a Malian Islamist group responsible for kidnapping Spanish aid workers in Algeria and a group of Algerian diplomats in Mali in 2012.
ISGS under his leadership since the pledge of allegiance to ISIS in 2015, has been blamed for most of the attacks in recent years on civilians, aid workers, and soldiers in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. His death despite being monumental it doesn’t necessarily mean that the group will be diminished but the transitional period in the leadership could be exploited to launch CT operations.
