They are competing for pretty much the same donors and recruits, so in a sick sort of way, they are trying to outdo one another in the violence and pitilessness of their attacks. “They didn’t speak French”.
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“We were really scared”. A witness told VOA that four men shouted, “Allahu Akbar!”. They also fear the tourism industry and their livelihoods will suffer as a result.
“We can conclude from it that AQIM’s move to widen its attacks across the region is the logical widening of the ongoing war against jihadists in northern Mali”, he told AFP.
This image made available by RTI via Associated Press television shows a dead body laying by a vehicle after an attack in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast, Sunday March 13, 2016.
Staff crouched and then fled along with customers, among them parents carrying babies or leading young children by the hand.
A man, apparently disguised as a waiter in a red waistcoat over a white dress shirt, enters with a rifle, fires at the empty bar and disappears behind it, where the Lebanese man had been hiding.
Josiane Sekongo, who lives across from one of the town’s many beachfront hotels, said she ran outside when she heard the gunfire and saw people running away from the beach.
The gunmen entered the beach from multiple directions, witnesses said. It would be another half hour before special units from the security forces arrived from Abidjan.
The victims include a French and the director of the Goethe Institute In Abidjan, Henrike Gross.
President Francois Hollande condemned the “cowardly and odious attack” in the town of Grand-Bassam in which one French citizen was killed. The French government had earlier said just one of its citizens had died.
The attack on Ivory Coast was “entirely predictable”, according to Isselmou Ould Salihi, a Mauritanian expert on jihadist groups.
“France will support the Ivory Coast in its initiatives against terrorism and believes that cooperation between all the states threatened by terrorist groups, particularly in West Africa, must be stronger than ever”, it read.
Ivory Coast’s President, Alassane Ouattara, reveals that, of the 16 people who had been gunned down in the resort popularly visited by Westerners, 14 had been civilians with two others revealed to be special forces soldiers.
In January, gunmen attacked the Hotel Splendid and Cappuccino Cafe in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, while an attack took place in November on the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali. He said that only three attackers were killed, not the six that was claimed on Sunday.
Olsen, now an ABC News consultant, said that it’s “quite easy for a handful of gunmen” to carry out attacks on so-called “soft targets”.
“Ivory Coast has been receiving warnings for at least a year from France’s intelligence service that Islamist militants are planning to attack major cities”, he said.
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Jacques Able, who identified himself as the owner of Etoile du Sud, said he rushed to the hotel after getting a phone call.
