Africa’s Islamists kill 3 French soldiers

A French pilot was killed during a helicopter raid to prevent Islamist groups controlling northern Mali from advancing toward the capital, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Saturday. “During this intense combat, one of our pilots… was fatally wounded,” the minister told reporters. The raid was carried out at around 1500 GMT on Friday and was launched to support Mali ground troops in the battle for the key town of Kona.
In another African theatre of engagement, two French soldiers were reported to have been killed in a failed French commando operation in Somalia, meant to rescue an abducted French secret agent.
The overnight operation was launched by France’s elite DGSE secret service, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in a statement, adding that the raid was sparked by the “intransigence of the terrorists who have refused to negotiate for three and a half years and were holding Denis Allex in inhuman conditions.”
But the Shebab extremists denied Le Drian’s assertion that they had killed the hostage, a secret agent whose alias is Denis Allex, adding that they would decide his fate in two days and issuing a stern warning to Paris.
Two French soldiers “lost their lives (and) 17 terrorists were killed” in the battle, Le Drian said, offering the “most sincere condolences” to the dead soldiers’ families and praising the men for their “courage and remarkable work”.
He said the families of the dead soldiers had been informed.
A Shebab statement said “in the end, it will be the French citizens who will inevitably taste the bitter consequences of their government’s devil-may-care attitude towards hostages.”
Sheikh Mohamed Abdallah, a local Shebab military commander, told AFP: “Mujahedeen fighters defeated the so-called commandos of the French government who tried to rescue a hostage, and they (the commandos) left the bodies of several of their own at the site of the attack.”
Abdallah is the commander of Bulomarer, where the raid allegedly took place.
The Shebab statement said the French carried away “several” of their dead.
“The helicopters attacked a house … upon the assumption that Denis Allex was being held at that location, but owing to a fatal intelligence blunder, the rescue mission turned disastrously wrong.
“Several French soldiers were killed in the battle and many more were injured before they fled from the scene of battle, leaving behind some military paraphernalia and even one of their comrades on the ground.
“The injured French soldier is now in the custody of the mujahedeen and Allex still remains safe and far from the location of the battle.”
A Bulomarer resident, Idris Youssouf, told AFP: “We don’t know exactly what happened because the attack took place at night, but this morning we saw several corpses including that of a white man.
“Three civilians were also killed in the gunfight,” he said.
The French secret agent was kidnapped in Somalia in July 2009 along with a colleague who was freed the following month.
Four military helicopters were used in the raid in Shebab-controlled Bulomarer, some 110 kilometres (70 miles) south of the Somali capital Mogadishu, witnesses said.