A presidential adviser told reporters on Saturday that seven Djiboutian troops had been killed in clashes between the army and an armed rebel organisation.
Djibouti, which includes military sites operated by the United States and China as well as one of East Africa’s largest ports, has had intermittent unrest, which is typically brought on by demonstrations against the president, Ismail Omar Guelleh, whose party has a firm grip on power.
According to Alexis Mohamed, a Guelleh aide, the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) was responsible for the most recent strike in the country’s north on Thursday night.
The ethnic Afari group FRUD, represented by a spokeswoman, denied any involvement in the attack and laid the responsibility on a splinter organisation.
FRUD, which was established in 1991, divided into two parties in 1994, one of which refused to sign the peace agreement.
On Thursday night, attackers struck an army base in the Tadjourah region’s Garabtissan neighborhood, killing one person and injuring a number of others, according to Mohamed.
“The barbaric act perpetrated … by a terrorist group against our army established in the north of the country will not go unpunished,” he said.
FRUD spokesperson Ibrahim Hamabou Hassan said in a statement the violence was “unjustifiable”, and accused an armed splinter group run by former military soldiers of carrying it out. According to Mohamed, the last FRUD assault resulted in the death of one policeman in January 2021.