Around 140 people died in attacks by alleged Islamist rebels in Mali and Niger.

79 attackers and 29 soldiers alone were killed when rebels attempted to storm an international army base in Niger.

The armed men drove to the base in the Tillabéri region with "hundreds" of motorcycles on Saturday, an army spokesman said on Sunday.

It was a base of the G5 Sahel, in which Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso are fighting together against insurgents in the Sahel region.

At least 31 people had previously been killed in a terrorist attack on a truck loaded with dozen people in Mali.

At least 17 other people were injured in the attack by armed men on Friday near the village of Songho, the Malian transitional government announced on Saturday.

The victims were on their way to a market in the town of Bandiagara in central Mali, which has seen three military coups since 2012.

1300 German soldiers left in Mali

Initially, no one confessed to the two attacks.

A number of armed groups are active in Chad, Niger and other Sahel countries.

Some have sworn their allegiance to the Al-Qaeda terrorist network or the Islamic State (IS) terrorist militia.

Other Islamist or ethnically organized militias are also active.

Germany still has around 1,300 soldiers stationed in Mali. A little more than 300 are assigned to the European training force EUTM Mali, the others to the UN stabilization mission Minusma. In the former French colony with around 20 million inhabitants, the military overthrew the transitional government in May, which was supposed to be in office until the presidential election in 2022. The putschist leader Assimi Goita was proclaimed the new interim president. In the country, more than a million people are currently at risk of starvation due to a drought.

The government of the Niger, which was also formerly a French colony, has little control in the desert-like expanses outside the cities.

The country with 23 million inhabitants ranks last out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).