NIAMEY: Eighteen members of the militant Islamic State group in the Greater Sahara were killed in a joint operation by US, French and Niger troops near Niger`s border with Mali, the defence ministry said on Thursday.

The June 8-18 operation took place in the northern border region of Tongo Tongo `targeting a gang of ISGS terrorists implicated in an ambush on May 14`, in which 28 Nigerian soldiers were killed, it said.

`The toll on the enemy side is: 18 terrorists neutralised, five terrorists, of whom three are Nigerian, taken prisoner.

There were `no human or material losses` during the operation, which was codenamed ACONIT, it said.

`Important material was recovered including equipment belonging to the Niger armed forces which were taken by the attackers af ter the ambush,` the statement said.

In October 2017, the ISGS claimed responsibility for a raid which killed four US soldiers and five Nigerian troops in the same region, a mere 20 kilometres 12 miles from the Malian border. That ambush claimed the largest number of American lives in combat anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa since the `Black Hawk Down` incident in Somalia in 1993.

On June 8, a US army vehicle hit a landmine near the town of Ouallam, about 100 kilometres north of the capital Niamey, but there were no casualties.

The area is near a major training camp where Nigerian soldiers are trained to servein a UN peacekeeping mission in Mali. Late Tuesday, gunmen attacked a police station on the northern edge of the Niger capital Niamey, killing two policemen. Niger is one of a number of poor, fragile countries in the Sahel region that have been hit by a jihadist revolt.-AFP