The army in Mali says it has killed 100 jihadists in a joint offensive with French forces.
In a statement, Mali’s military said another 20 Islamist insurgents were captured in the operation, which ran throughout January.
Militants control large parts of the Sahel desert region.
Since an Islamist insurgency erupted in northern Mali in 2012 the violence there has spread to neighbouring Niger and Burkina Faso.
France has more than 5,000 military personnel in the region as part of a long-running operation intended to stop violence by Islamist militants.
France’s president and his counterparts from the Sahel region are meeting to discuss military operations against Islamist militants in West Africa. We look at the figures behind the conflict, which is slipping out of control.
Attacks on army positions and civilians across the region are occurring with increasing regularity, despite the presence of thousands of troops from both the countries affected and France. Last year saw the highest annual death toll due to armed conflict in the region since 2012.
Last week, 89 soldiers from Niger were killed in the latest attack to see dozens of deaths among regional armed forces. France has also suffered significant casualties, losing 13 soldiers in a helicopter crash in Mali in November.
The Sahel region, a semi-arid stretch of land just south of the Sahara Desert, has been a frontline in the war against Islamist militancy for almost a decade.
However, it is increasingly clear that the problem facing Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania (known as the G5 Sahel) is not just the presence of armed groups, and that more than military action is urgently needed to address a worsening humanitarian crisis, climate change and development challenges.
The overarching worry is that the crisis could spread further across West Africa.
The security crisis in the region started in 2012 when an alliance of separatist and Islamist militants took over northern Mali, triggering a French military intervention to oust them as they advanced towards the capital, Bamako.
A peace deal was signed in 2015 but was never completely implemented and new armed groups have since emerged and expanded to central Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
Casualties from attacks in those countries are believed to have increased fivefold since 2016, with over 4,000 deaths reported last year alone. -BBC
