Leader of Islamic State in Sahara Killed by French Drone Strike

A prominent Islamic State leader in the Sahel has been killed in a French operation using drone strikes and a ground assault on the Mali-Niger border, French President Emmanuel Macron said.

Macron tweeted the news in the early hours of Thursday, acknowledging an unspecified number of French casualties in the operation, which killed Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, thought to be the key organiser of attacks in the region on US troops and French aid workers.  

“This evening, the nation’s thoughts are with all its heroes who have died in the Sahel for France in the Serval and Barkhane operations, with the grieving families, with all its wounded,” Macron said. Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly said later in a media conference on Thursday that Sahrawi had been killed in a drone strike. 

“His [Sahrawi’s] death deals a decisive blow to the leadership of the Islamic State in the Sahel,” she told reporters. “They will without a doubt have trouble replacing him. We have no information on a successor at this stage, but it probably won't be easy to find a leader who has the same weighting than the one who was killed.”

Sahrawi, who led Islamic State’s operations across West Africa, had a $5 million US government bounty on his head. 

Dubbed “Sahrawi” for his roots in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, the 48-year-old Lehbib Yumani trained as a young man with the leftist Polisario rebel movement which seeks independence from Morocco. He later joined an al-Qaeda affiliated group operating in the sub-Sahara. He pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara in 2015

He has since worked as the head of the group’s movement in the border triangle between Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, imposing ISIS’s strict interpretation of Islamic law on people in the rural areas under his control.  Sahrawi is believed to be responsible for the high-profile ambush of a joint US-Nigerian patrol in 2017, which killed four US troops, as well as the beheading of six French aid workers in August last year.

France has long been invested in the fight against Islamist groups that have branched off from al-Qaeda in the last decade, and grown to prominence across the Sahel in countries with colonial links to Paris.  Operation Barkhane, as it is known, has involved the deployment of 5,000 French troops over the last nine years but has achieved little in the fight against extremism.

Macron announced in June that troop numbers in Mali would be cut in half, after a military coup replaced president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta.