The leader of the al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Abdelmalek Droukdel, who led terror attacks on targets across West Africa in the past decade, was killed in a military operation in Mali this week, French and U.S. officials said.
French forces supported by allies, “neutralized the emir of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Abdelmalek Droukdel and several of his close associates, during an operation in northern Mali” on June 3, France's Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly said in a post on Twitter.
The U.S. provided intelligence and surveillance support to “fix the target” and deliver a blow that would reduce the terror network's ability to operate, Christopher Karns, a spokesman for the U.S. Africa Command, said in a statement on Saturday.
An Algerian national, Droukdel carried out attacks in Tunisia and Algeria before briefly occupying the cities of Timbuktu and Gao in northern Mali in 2012. His group was also responsible for attacking the Radisson Blu hotel in the Malian capital, Bamako, in 2015 and a seaside resort popular with Westerners in Ivory Coast in 2016.
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