Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger show no signs of beating back stubborn Islamist insurgencies. Western leaders, whose military involvement over the past decade has done little to stem violence, seem at a loss at how to respond to coups in Burkina Faso and Mali.
Burkina Faso is in the direst straits. Jihadi groups control an estimated 40 percent of its territory, including vast rural areas in the north and east. Militants have laid siege to a major northern town, Djibo, for months. Fighting has killed thousands of people and driven nearly 2 million from their homes. As the losses mount, so does finger-pointing within the army. Two coups this past year, both triggered by massacres of troops by militants, have seen a lieutenant colonel, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, seize power in January, only to be ousted in September by a previously unknown captain, Ibrahim Traoré. Traoré himself is struggling to unify divided security forces. He may follow the lead of his Malian counterparts by playing to populist sentiment, criticising France, and drawing closer to Russia. Most worryingly, Traoré is recruiting volunteers to battle jihadis, which could send ethnic bloodshed spiralling.
Mali suffered two coups of its own, in 2020 and 2021. The state is virtually absent in the far north. There, Islamic State- and al-Qaeda-linked militants fight one another and battle non-jihadi rebels, who are predominantly Tuareg, a community that spans much of the Sahel. Tuareg rebels inked a deal with Bamako in 2015, hoping to win army positions and devolution. But now, feeling abandoned, some rebels may see benefit in again uniting with jihadis. (Al-Qaeda-linked militants joined and then usurped a Tuareg-dominated separatist rebellion that captured northern Mali about a decade ago.) Farther south, in central Mali, fighting that pits Malian forces and Russian Wagner Group mercenaries against militants seems stalemated and marked by both sides’ rampant human rights abuses.
Niger is in better shape, though there are worrying signs there, too. The government has either integrated civilian militias into the security forces or refused to arm them. Its readiness to engage jihadi groups may also have contributed to a lull in violence. Still, President Mohamed Bazoum survived a coup attempt in March 2021, and subsequent arrests, including among high-ranking officers, may have fuelled hostility within the army. Jihadis have entered parks and forests along the Burkina Faso and Benin borders, drawing closer to the capital, Niamey.
Outside involvement in the Sahel is evolving fast. France, which intervened to oust militants from northern Mali in 2013, has ended its operations in that country, given fraught ties with Bamako, though it retains bases in Niger. A UN mission, in Mali since April 2013, has also struggled to make headway. The West now seems most concerned with preventing jihadis from spreading southward to the Gulf of Guinea. Regionwide anger against the French is rising, thanks in large part to a decade of Western failures to check militants’ advances but also to Russian disinformation. Wagner’s brutal guns for hire are hardly likely to do better, but many locals chafe at criticism of the Russian group given past the West’s legacy.
Most vital at a moment of inflection for the region is that leaders rethink what has been a predominantly military-centric approach to tackling Islamists. Military operations play a role, but must be subservient to efforts to mend intercommunal relations, win over people in the hinterlands and potentially even talk to militant leaders. Western governments should feel chastened by their record over the past decade. But as some Sahelian leaders turn to Moscow, it would be a mistake to cut ties and try to force them to pick sides.