personnel, nor the ISIS propaganda music the jihadis had edited over the sounds of combat. Once ISIS released the video and it became public, Newsweek obtained the clip Monday from one of many pro-ISIS accounts sharing it and chose to publish a 27-second excerpt that did not feature any injury to or death of U.S. presence in the region has become part of the war there, as did the presence of dozens of American drones in Niger,' Maali told Newsweek.

But the exposure of American forces to the ambush during the month of October in the town of Tongo Tongo on the border between Mali and Niger, while carrying out the elements of a combat mission, revealed that the U.S. 'The American military presence was supposed to be limited to the training and rehabilitation of the armies of the region. was playing in a region already fraught with instability. Army Special Forces operating on the restive Niger-Mali border, he said the footage showed the growing role the U.S. Maali said he believed that The New York Times also possessed a copy and that his agency received the video through 'many contacts from different areas, but we are not distributors of Islamic State material.' Analyzing the greater implications of U.S. Army Special Forces attempting to flee an ambush from up to 50 ISIS-affiliated fighters near the border village of Tongo Tongo, Niger, on October 4, 2017. 'The agency received the video but did not publish it out of respect for the feelings of the families of the slain American soldiers, whose faces are shown,' Maali said.Ī still image from the ISIS video 'Assault of the Brave Against the Army of the Americans' shows U.S. In a new interview, Maali revealed why his agency chose not to publish it. News of the video spread and circulated among journalists, as The Washington Post reported, but ISIS did not begin circulating the video until Monday. That same day, the Pentagon's Africa Command confirmed it was probing Maali's posts, which appeared in Arabic and French. Maali told Newsweek that the tape had been acquired by the Mauritanian outlet he worked for, Agence Nouakchott d'information. soldiers killed in Niger seen battling ISIS in new video of their last moments alive

Accompanying the tweet, he explained that he had obtained footage showing the infamous October 4 attack claimed only days earlier by ISIS. Mohammed Mahmoud Abu al-Maali, a Mauritanian author and expert on jihadi groups in West Africa, tweeted a blurry screenshot of what appeared to be a wounded or dead U.S. Updated | A recently released graphic video showing the deaths of Green Berets defending against an ambush from purported Islamic State militant group (ISIS) fighters in Niger shows not only the harsh realities of war but also its complexities, according to a researcher who helped uncover the grisly tape.

Full video ambush and death of