Tourine ambush

Tourine ambush
Part of Insurgency in the Maghreb
Location	Tourine, Mauritania
Date	September 14–15, 2008
Target	Mauritanian Army
Victims	12 captured and executed
Perpetrators	AQIM Abdelhamid Abou Zeid Djamel Okacha

The Tourine ambush, also known as the Tourine massacre, was one of the September 14, 2008, jihadists from Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) ambushed Mauritanian soldiers in the village of Tourine, near Zouérat, Mauritania. The ambush was the first major attack by AQIM during the Insurgency in the Sahel, and sparked major changes in the Mauritanian military.

Background

Since 2005, remnants of the jihadist Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) militia that committed various massacres during the Algerian Civil War began conducting an insurgency in rural Mauritania and Mali. Between 2005 and 2008, the group recruited from Mauritanian madrasas, and renamed itself to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and established ties with the global Al-Qaeda network in 2007.

AQIM was able to gain so much influence in Mauritania due to the country's relatively weak military and impoverished, rural society.

Ambush

On the night between September 14 and 15, 2008, a patrol of six Mauritanian army vehicles drove south from Zouérat. Eighty kilometers from the city, near the village of Tourine, AQIM fighters ambushed the convoy. The initial report stated that four vehicles were destroyed, damaged, or captured, and eleven soldiers and a guide were missing. Survivors of the ambush returned to the base in Zouerat. A text from AQIM emir Abdelmalek Droukdel the following day confirmed that AQIM carried out the ambush. Droukdel claimed to have captured twelve soldiers and three vehicles.

On September 20, the Mauritanian government announced the discovery of twelve bodies all found decapitated. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a senior AQIM member, denied that the Mauritanian soldiers were beheaded by AQIM, although it is unlikely he was present during the ambush. The ambush and beheadings were likely carried out by three other katibas, commanded by Abdelhamid Abou Zeid and Djamel Okacha.

In 2008, in response, to the attack, parts of northern Mauritania were considered a "military zone" to prevent further AQIM attacks.

Special Intervention Groups were also created to patrol the desert, and new cities were created to help monitor nomadic societies in which jihadists could be embedded. On March 20, 2011, four AQIM jihadists were sentenced to death in Nouakchott for their involvement in the ambush and beheadings. Another jihadist was sentenced to two years in prison, and one was acquitted.