Dozens killed by armed men in SW Niger

The attacks on Monday occurred in the Tillabery region, which is near the border with Mali and Burkina Faso and has seen increasingly deadly attacks by terrorists active across the region with links to the terrorist groups of Daesh and Al-Qaeda, according to AFP.

Suspected militants killed at least 100 civilians on Jan. 2 in raids on two villages in Tillabery, one of the deadliest episodes in the country’s recent history.

The assailants this time intercepted four vehicles transporting passengers from a weekly market to the villages of Chinagoder and Darey Dey, the government said in a statement on Tuesday.

"These individuals then gutlessly and cruelly proceeded to carry out targeted executions of passengers," it said. "In the village of Darey Dey, they killed people and burned the granaries.”

The violence is part of a wider security crisis in West Africa's Sahel region. Many of the terrorist attacks are concentrated where the borders of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso meet, a zone that a 5,000-strong French anti-militant task force has targeted heavily.

Niger and its neighbors have also experienced tit-for-tat killings between rival ethnic communities, stoked by the militant violence and competition for scarce resources.