Four jihadists escaped Sunday evening from a prison in Nouakchott by killing two police officers, in Mauritania, a country which is an exception in the Sahel since it has been spared attacks since 2011.
“At 9 p.m. on March 5, 2023, four terrorists managed to escape from Nouakchott central prison after assaulting the guards, which led to an exchange of fire during which two members of the National Guard” died and two others were lightly injured, the interior ministry said in a statement.
The identity of the fugitives has not been disclosed.
Two of them had been sentenced to death, and the other two are awaiting trial for belonging to a terrorist organization, according to a military official who requested anonymity.
The same source specified that their vehicle had been found in the northeast of Nouakchott.
The death penalty has not been applied since 1987 in Mauritania.
Tracking
“The National Guard has tightened its control over the prison and immediately began to track the fugitives in order to arrest them as quickly as possible,” also assured the ministry, which called on citizens to provide any information that could contribute to their capture.
The cooperation of the populations to fight against jihadism is part of the link in the security system that preserves the country from jihadism, while the latter continues to spread among its Sahelian neighbors.
While border Mali has counted its dead since a jihadist insurgency began in 2012, Mauritania, four million inhabitants, has not experienced an attack on its soil since 2011.
However, it was regularly targeted by these movements in the 2000s, in particular targeted attacks and kidnappings.
Mauritania is part with Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad of the G5 Sahel, which Mali left in 2022, and of its joint anti-jihadist force supported by France, the United States and the UN. Paris claims with Nouakchott an important security and defense cooperation, in addition to development.
The Mauritanian authorities are investing in training and working to retain soldiers: inflated budgets, new equipment, salaries paid to the bank, social support for soldiers.
Dialogue
Mauritania also advocates dialogue to win the battle of wits.
From 2010, a dialogue was organized between the main ulemas and around 70 jihadists in prison. The religious leaders convince about fifty of them to repent. Among them, some are sent on television, in mosques, to preach to young people that jihad is not the right path.
More than 500 imams are recruited, and young people from mahadras (traditional Islamic schools) are offered vocational training.
More recently, in 2022, Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani pardoned eight prisoners convicted of “terrorism” in a logic of “fighting” against extremism through “dialogue”, according to the official news agency.
Mauritania has on several occasions organized dialogue sessions with its jihadist prisoners, since ex-president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz (2008 to 2019), to obtain their repentance and reintegrate them into social life. Thirty of them had already benefited from it.