20110706
Reuters
NOUAKCHOTT (Reuters) - Fighting erupted between Mauritania's army and suspected Islamists in the east of the country on Tuesday, with witnesses reporting heavy and automatic weapons fire and the aircraft flying overhead.

Few details were available about the clash, which comes after Al Qaeda's North Africa wing, known as AQIM, said it killed 20 Mauritanian soldiers in fighting in Mali last month, rejecting claims by Nouakchott that 15 jihadists had died, according to a U.S.-based monitoring service.

Countries in Africa's Sahel-Sahara region are battling an increased threat from gunmen linked to al Qaeda, who frequently cooperate with and operate alongside a plethora of rebels, bandits and traffickers in the huge, largely desert zone.

Witnesses said suspected AQIM fighters attacked a military base in Bassiknou, near Nema, in the far east of Mauritania, on Tuesday afternoon.

"There was lots of automatic weapons fire and we heard heavy weapons fire for about an hour," resident Cheikhna Ould Deddah Bouya told Reuters by telephone from the town. "Two military aircraft flew over the area and the shooting stopped".

Tuesday's fighting follows a fierce battle on June 24 in the Wagadou forest in Mali, near the border with Mauritania, during which Mauritania's army said it killed 15 Islamists and lost two soldiers in a raid on an AQIM base.

In a statement initially sent to the Nouakchott News Agency on July 3, AQIM has denied Mauritania's versions of the battle.

AQIM said the operation resulted in "the death of no less than 20 soldiers and the destruction and burning of 12 vehicles," according to a translation by the SITE jihadist monitoring group of the AQIM statement, originally in Arabic.

The group said it had lost two men in the battle but seized some light weapons, according to SITE.

SITE said the Nouakchott News Agency has previously received al Qaeda statements before they appeared on jihadist forums elsewhere.

The Wagadou raid appeared to be a joint operation between Mali and Mauritania, two nations that have had a prickly relationship in the fight against AQIM due to previous unsanctioned Mauritanian raids into Mali.

Western nations, led by France and the U.S. have been struggling to forge better regional cooperation between African nations, a weakness that AQIM has taken advantage of to establish itself in the desert zones.