Niger Says 26,000 Displaced People in Southeast Are Now Home
Voice of America
NIAMEY, NIGER - More than 26,000 people who fled in 2015 jihadist attacks in southeastern Niger were returned to their hometown, in the Diffa region, local authorities said on Friday.
"These are 26,573 people from 8,190 households who have already been transported to 19 villages at the end of the first phase of the IDP return operations," an official from the governorate of the Diffa region told AFP. This region bordering Nigeria is home to 300,000 Nigerian refugees and internally displaced persons, driven out by the atrocities of the jihadists of the Nigerian group Boko Haram and its dissident branch of the Islamic State group in West Africa (Iswap), according to the U.N. Nigerien public television showed images on Thursday evening of the last wave ending this first phase, of 11,733 people en route to their locality of origin in trucks chartered by the authorities.
FILE - Hippos are known to be territorial and aggressive at times. This photo provided by Craig Manders shows his wife, Lisa, in Zambia in mid-2024. Lisa Manders was killed in a hippopotamus attack during this trip while on a safari with her husband and died on June 5.
Tires burn as supporters of Lebanese Shiite Islamist movement Hezbollah stand before Lebanese Army soldiers during a Hezbollah-organized rally to block the road to Beirut International Airport over a decision to bar two Iranian flights from landing there, Feb. 15, 2025.
FILE - In this Dec. 23, 2021, file photo, Pope Francis, left, shakes hands with Sister Raffaella Petrini at the Vatican. On Saturday, she was named president of the Vatican City State.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio boards a plane to the Munich Security Conference in Germany from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Feb. 13, 2025.
Timbuktu. Mali
FILE - Sebastian Gorka, left, speaks during a press conference outside Manhattan criminal court on May 21, 2024, in New York. Gorka, now a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, said on Feb. 11, 2025, that the threat from jihadists is growing.
Pope Francis is hospitalized with a respiratory tract infection at Rome's Gemelli Hospital, shown here on Feb. 15, 2025.
A screen displays Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he speaks during the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Feb. 15, 2025.
Firefighters extinguish a burning UNIFIL vehicle, set ablaze by protesters, on the road leading to Beirut's international airport on Feb. 14, 2025.
FILE - A USAID flag flutters outside as the USAID building sits closed to employees after a memo was issued freezing funding, in Washington, Feb. 3, 2025.
FILE - Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown speaks during a plenary session at the COP29 UN Climate Summit, Nov. 13, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
A view of a selection of the mummified bodies in the exhibition area of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. (Emma Paolin via AP) Emma Paolin, a researcher at University of Ljubljana, background, and Dr. Cecilia Bembibre, lecturer at University College London, take swab samples for microbiological analysis at the Krakow University of Economics. (Abdelrazek Elnaggar via AP)