Paris and Washington Go Scorched Earth in the Sahel 

According to VOA, the US is doing “soul searching” about its mission in the Sahel region of Africa —  and largely finding the same answers.

Maj. General Ekman, who oversaw the recent US withdrawal from Niger which was completed in September, said Niger’s expulsion of US forces will not change the American mission.

“How we will pursue [those objectives], either together or apart, as a consequence of the withdrawal remains to be seen, but we wanted to make sure we kept all options on the table,” he said.

Before the government overthrows in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, the US had hundreds of forces in two Niger bases that served as what Washington calls counterterrorism hubs. Burkina Faso and Mali also hosted American Special Forces teams.

If there was hope that the removal of US forces from these countries would lead to a rethink of the AFRICOM mission in the region, that is not coming to pass. The US is instead upping its presence in neighboring countries Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Benin.

“If our presence in Niger allowed us to go inside out, relative to the Sahelian-based VEO [violent extremist organization] threat, we now have to revert to going outside in,” Ekman said.

The Sahel, a vast region spanning parts of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, is known for its economic hardship and violence, but the new governments in these nations are taking major steps towards breaking free from foreign influence and asserting local sovereignty . There’s a lot of hope. As Stanley Kwabla Arku, a Ghanaian journalist with Pan African Television, writes:

The Sahel’s recent shifts have ignited a movement against foreign military involvement, particularly French influence, which many local voices say has fueled conflict and stymied economic progress. This groundswell of anti-imperialist sentiment has resulted in what organizers describe as “patriotic uprisings,” led by popular forces and progressive alliances within state institutions like the military. These uprisings have reshaped governance in the region, as people demand sovereignty and work to assert a more independent future.

These aspirations are running up against violent constraints, however, as US military officials say ‘I told you so.’ From The African:

The pursuit of economic prosperity and healthy sovereignty by Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, is likely to be waylaid as terrorism continues to undermine country and regional security and stability…The Africa Centre for Strategy Studies estimates that the 11 643 fatalities in the Sahel during 2023 represent a “near threefold increase” from levels seen in 2020 and a “record high” in militant Islamic-group violence since the “peak of the Boko Haram violence in 2015”…The road towards self-determination, sustainable development and sovereignty is potholed by persistent violent attacks by Islamic militant groups. Weakened by these constant attacks, the three junta governments are unable to get on with the business of stabilising and governing their countries.

“They’re absolutely feeling [the loss of Western military personnel],” a senior US military official told VOA.

A big reason why is that the US and France are helping to drive the violence, including uusing Ukraine, much the same way they do with Israel, to destabilize nations and regions that threaten Western capital.

Ukraine Terrorist Inc.

The US’ purported mission in the Sahel is to fight “terrorism,” which somehow always gets worse despite the American operations.

The terrorists are now being assisted by the US proxy state of Ukraine. Kiev supported a July attack by Tuareg rebels in Mali that killed Malian government troops and Wagner Group mercenaries, likely with an assist from other Western governments. Some background: Since 2013, France has been assisting the Malian government in a fight against paramilitary groups. However, after the 2020 coup, Paris refused to recognise the new government and pushed the western-backed Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to impose severe economic sanctions and trade restrictions on Mali. In response, Mali expelled French forces and withdrew from ECOWAS, turning to Moscow for support.

The Ukrainians are actively training and equipping terrorist groups, which means in a roundabout way that the likes of the US and France are working with the very same extremist groups they’re purportedly there to fight.

Mali and Niger have since ended diplomatic relations with Ukraine, and Russia’s standing only improves in the region where it signs economic, energy, and defense deals. It’s another reminder of just how spectacularly the Ukraine gambit to isolate and collapse Russia does the opposite. France’s overseas interests have been decimated over the past few years.

France got the boot from what now constitutes the Confederation of the Alliance of Sahel States ( AES – Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger). And Paris failed to get ECOWAS to militarily intervene against the AES. Desperate to reverse its downfall in the region, Paris is working with Kiev to terrorize populations and discredit governments in the Sahel.

If one wonders about why France continues to pour money into Ukraine (the “Anne of Kyiv” brigade—a nod to the medieval Ukrainian princess who became Queen of France— just completed over two months of training with French military forces in eastern and southern France), the Sahel might provide some clues. The forces involved in the Mali attack were from a coalition of armed separatist groups consisting of the Cadre Stratégique pour la Défense du Peuple de l’Azawad (CSP-DPA) and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Group for Supporters of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), which reportedly received training from Ukrainian forces in Mauritania and Ukraine.

A CSP-DPA spokesman downplayed any special ties to Ukraine’s intelligence services, however, saying “We have links with the Ukrainians, but just as we have with everyone else, the French, Americans, and others.”

Good to know.

***

Sahel states are increasingly demanding more compensation from mining operations and outright nationalizing them. Three out of four light bulbs in France were reportedly powered by Nigerien uranium. In contrast, only 10 to 20 percent of Nigeriens in urban areas have access to electricity, while roughly 3 percent do in the rural areas. That is changing.

Members of West Africa’s anti-imperialist bloc – the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) – have made multiple headlines this year by taking back control of their mining resources. Burkina Faso recently nationalised two gold mines; Niger expelled French mining company Orano from its… pic.twitter.com/jeos9AE8SA

— African Stream (@african_stream) September 30, 2024

Kodjovi Kpachavi, an organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, notes the damage this is doing to Orano:

 In July, Orano shared that its 2024 operating income (i.e. revenue minus expenses) had decreased from $289 million in the first half of 2023 to $13 million in the first half of 2024 . This equates to a loss of 80% of their operating income compared to 2023. While publicly they have attempted to save face, Orano losing their primary supply of uranium has forced them to attempt to revive old mines near the end of their life-cycle in Canada and negotiate new deals with Kazakhstan, a country that they had been avoiding due to their relationship with Russia .

In addition to enlisting to the help of Ukrainian forces to train and arm African paramilitaries, Paris and Brussels are so frustrated they’ve enlisted the dreaded special representative to the Sahel, noting that the region “is of strategic importance to the EU in terms of security and stability, international climate and sustainable development commitments and migration routes linked to Europe.”

No doubt. Meanwhile, western mining firms are up in arms.  From the Financial Times:

John Meyer, partner at corporate advisory firm SP Angel, said the new rules represented a “significant increase in the effective taxation of miners” operating in the country.

“A near worst-case scenario now appears to be evolving whereby companies are being required to hand over a further 15 per cent of their projects in Mali for very little in the way of compensation,” he said. “The situation will dissuade many companies from further investment in Mali, and we suspect all but the most essential exploration will stop.”

However, Barrick is sanguine about its prospects of resolving its dispute in Mali, which accounts for 13 per cent of the company’s gold production.

Since the sovereignist governments in Sahel nations got interested in obtaining more profit share of mines, the operations are coming under increasing attack:

Graphs from the Global Terrorism Index 2024 report reveal non-state organizations’ interest in gold mines in the Sahel region. In addition to gold, oil, uranium, natural gas, and lithium mines are also the focus of organizations in the Sahel region. pic.twitter.com/2H3FgYPs76

— Levent Kemal (@leventkemaI) May 8, 2024

Meanwhile, imperial stooges like Mathew Edds-Reitman, a program manager at the US Institute of Peace, explain that the Sahel violence is the result of overthrowing Western-backed governments and that the “best way to protect” these states and their populations “is to buttress their democracy and resilience.”

Democracy and resilience. Those are, of course, code words for Western capital interests and their governments’ forces. It’s difficult to discern how Edds-Reitman “analysis” is any different from the mafia issuing veiled threats (“shame if something were to happen”) while simultaneously offering “protection.”

So what is the true AFRICOM mission? Many argue it’s to perpetuate violence in order to keep the Americans in and make nations reliant on Western military support and hardware.  As Abayomi Azikiwe, the editor of Pan-African News Wire, writes:

The idea behind AFRICOM and the French counterparts known as Operation Barkhane and the G5, was to train the post-colonial military forces in the ethos of imperialism. For years many of these regimes, whether bourgeois democratic or military, provided diplomatic and political cover for the continuation of the exploitation of African resources and labor.

Once those same Western-trained and equipped forces threw out Western advisers and businesses (or demanded a fairer shake), the fact that Ukrainians began assisting African paramilitaries and attacks on mines jumped indicate that the governments in Paris and Washington are resorting to terrorism in an attempt to keep the Sahel states under their control as.

The Incoming Trump Administration and AFRICOM

As the New Not-So Cold War between Washington and Moscow spills into the Sahel, could a Trump-led detente with Russia lead to a pull back in US forces from the region. There are reasons to doubt that.

AFRICOM has faced the prospect of having its operations scaled back before. As Nick Turse reported back in 2020:

Facing a potential drawdown of forces, AFRICOM has been making the case that its bases and the missions run from them are integral to U.S. interests. “Strategic access to Africa, its airspace, and its surrounding waters is vital to U.S. national security,” Townsend told the Senate Armed Services Committee late last month. He and others have argued for what they contend is AFRICOM’s supposed bang for the buck. “What U.S. Africa Command accomplishes with relatively few people and few dollars, on a continent three-and-a-half times the size of the continental United States, is a bargain for the American taxpayer,” Manley told The Intercept. [1]

The argument goes that African minerals are critical to US national security to reduce dependency on China – something to keep in mind with the arrival of Team Trump China hawks.

Yet at the same time, Western firms have been selling off mines to China. For example, Chinese companies have spent the past decade and billions of dollars buying out U.S. and European miners in the DRC’s Cobalt belt, leading to control of 15 of 19 of the primary cobalt mines in the country. about 80 percent of the world’s cobalt processing occurs in China before being incorporated into lithium-ion batteries.

The US has little business interests itself in the Sahel where French, Australian, Canadian, and UK mining companies took the lead. The US is instead turning its attention to the wealthier coastal countries of West Africa, particularly along critical Atlantic Ocean shipping lanes where the US conducts about $4 billion in two-way trade (and where reports are that China wants to eventually open its second African military base). A report from Africa Intelligence indicates that the U.S. is preparing additional military aid for several West African nations, with a particular focus on Ghana, Benin, and Côte d’Ivoire.

It will be interesting to see if that fact affects the outlook of the incoming Trump administration, which could potentially be eyeing a more isolationist stance. If that’s the case, the US could leave French and other Western nations to sort out their own business in the Sahel.

Director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard is an interesting case. While she has long opposed US interventionist wars, she’s also offered complete support for Israel and is a big believer in “radical Islamic ideology” fueling terrorism. She seems to prefer to fight that ideology with small teams and Obama-style drone waves leading some to view her nomination in a negative light:

I tweeted about her being in Africa’s Sahel, back in 2021 (in my lost account), when she went to supervise training of al Qaeda in Africa. Her “go after” is of course nonsense since both al Qaeda & ISIS are mercenaries led by the US
She is now officially the Terrorists Big Boss https://t.co/uEGO93zhUh pic.twitter.com/TKDFAa9axE

— Cindy Somemore (@cindysomemore) November 13, 2024

If the incoming administration is hyper-focused on China, which appears to be the case, it stands to reason the US will be active in Africa with one of the few tools the US has: the military. That’s because China happens to be dominating Africa. While American big tech, aspects of which are cozy with Team Trump, are competing with Chinese companies for dominance in Africa, and Exxon Mobil and Chevron have operations across Africa, US interests are mostly dwarfed by Beijing. Ken Opalo, a political scientist at Georgetown University, writes at An Africanist Perspective: 

Importantly, France is no longer the undisputed major power when it comes to francophone African countries’ foreign relations. The last two decades have seen China supplant France as these countries’ largest trade partner. China is now a bigger trade trade partner for francophone African states than the United States, the United Kingdom, and France combined. More recently, countries like the Central African Republic (CAR), Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali have forged closer security ties with Russia. France’s situation looks even worse when one considers its share of total trade to/from its former African colonies. Among these countries, French share of trade plummeted from more than a quarter in the early 1990s to just over 5%.

Here’s how it looks for Africa as a whole:

With Beijing’s heavy presence comes risk, however. And there is the line of thinking that chaos in Africa, and the Sahel in particular, damages China, which is a consolation prize for the West losing influence. For example, oil is once again flowing through a Chinese pipeline from Niger to Benin’s seaport, but it has come under attack in recent months. More from Geopolitical Futures:

Beijing could, however, scale back or block unsuccessful and riskier economic projects, including those in Niger, if there is not the return of at least a modicum of stability. The African turmoil does not allow the People’s Republic to develop a true transcontinental corridor any time soon, making the creation of a military base on the Atlantic less pressing. Such a base would be a useful lookout to the west, but would remain isolated, far from the Chinese coast and Djibouti.

It’s essentially a scorched earth retreat. And that decision is likely to boomerang on them like so many others.

Western governments are now complaining about how Russia is allegedly helping Yemen’s Houthis close the Red Sea to western shipping. We see how France’s interests in Africa have collapsed, with Moscow potentially giving a little push to that house of cards.  It was irresponsible, yet fitting, for Western governments to think they could launch a proxy war against Russia and not face some consequences elsewhere. Russia, China, and others are increasingly refusing to just sit back and be targets, but are instead harming Western economic interests in kind.

And the full-fledged backing of terrorism in the Sahel is only damaging the West’s position there. Now as France is being pushed out, Washington fears the increasing presence of Russia and China. Africom’s commander Michael E. Langley has accused Russia and China of leading a disinformation campaign in the Sahel to undermine U.S. influence in West and Central Africa.

As the US expands its presence in coastal west africa, analysts caution that the expanding American military footprint in West Africa could inadvertently provide terrorist groups with more fuel for the fire.

Well that’s not a bad outcome if the goal is self-perpetuating conflict.

It’s well-known even in the US that Indeed, a 2011 report from the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence tried to explain Boko Haram’s popularity. Reasons included “a feeling of alienation from the wealthier, Christian, oil-producing, southern Nigeria, pervasive poverty, rampant government corruption, heavy-handed security measures, and the belief that relations with the West are a corrupting influence.”

The response? Nigeria, which had been transforming into an arm of US Africa Command ever since the dawn of the “War on Terror”, executed Boko Haram’s leader and state forces began killing or displacing thousands of Nigerian Muslims. And everything has gone pretty much according to plan since then. From MR Online:

It’s not as if strategists don’t understand that violence doesn’t work. They understand that violence escalates violence which can then be used as pretexts for more violence. A U.S. Council on Foreign Relations article from 2020 notes: “the last two years have been deadlier than any other period for Nigerian soldiers since the Boko Haram insurgency began.”

Hanna Eid, writing at Al Mayadeen, compares the Western-backed terror campaign to the CIA post-WWII Operation Gladio, which used fascist stay-behind armies to destabilize and discredit Socialist governments and Communist parties in Europe. The legacy of that successful operation is what we see today: a European political class that sees themselves as faithful servants to the US empire and transnational capital and have nothing but scorn for the local peasants.

We’ll see if the Sahel nations fare better than Europe did.

Reasons for Hope

While analysts write that the US “lost” the Sahel, they also stress that Russia will not be a “savior.” This misses the fact that the people of the region are not looking for a savior but instead a fair deal for resources, as well as things like infrastructure, industry, and technology transfer. Russia and China, at least for now, check those boxes.

Despite the increasing violence in the region, driven at least in part by the West, progress is evident — contrary to Western reports of oppressive autocracy — and demanding more money from the mining operations is a big part of it. In Burkina Faso, for example, “the current administration is subsidizing the cost of agricultural equipment for farmers and has set a goal to increase the productivity of irrigated areas by at least 50%.” Kpachavi writes:

The [Alliance of Sahel States]’s development of roads, hospitals, health programs, agricultural programs, factories , reforestation programs , safety and security initiatives , women’s unions , and more have been deliberately ignored by western media.

And more important details from Inemesit Richardson, the co-founder of The Thomas Sankara Center for African Liberation and Unity, a Pan-African library and political education center based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso:

…there is very little that has happened within the AES that did not begin first as a call emanating from the grassroots. The reason why AES leaders are so beloved by their people is because they have consistently submitted to the people’s will. There would not even be an Alliance of Sahel States in any form if the AES leaders did not listen to the cries of their people to form one. Mass mobilisations led by civil society organizations called for the removal of French troops from the soils of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. The leaders heard this call and followed the demands of their people. Niger was at the vanguard of calling for the expulsion of US troops as well, civilians having protested against AFRICOM’s presence for many years.

…People in the Sahel today are very perceptive and understand the strategies and tactics of imperialism. They know that the current imperialist talking point is that ‘both sides are bad’ or that they need ‘neither Russia nor France’ and they don’t fall for this rhetoric anymore.

People also appreciate partnerships with Iran for similar reasons. Iran is a powerful country that has a great capacity to defend itself and resist imperialist aggression. Countries like Russia and Iran are important to the people of the Sahel because, beyond collaborating within the areas of security, they offer the AES countries a pathway towards industrialization through the creation of factories, refineries, and power plants.

It would seem that the new leaders, with help from “Axis of Evil” countries, are providing material benefits to the people as opposed to what came before: ever-worsening violence, brutal poverty, and off the charts corruption. Following that, Russia doesn’t have to do much to come out like a “savior.”

Notes

[1] Turse’s piece goes on to note an inspector general’s report examining U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa, which notes that “the threat posed by al Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia in East Africa remains ‘high,’ despite continued U.S. airstrikes and training of Somali security forces,” the Defense Intelligence Agency told the Defense Department’s Inspector General. The DoDIG further noted that al-Shabab not only “remains a potent threat” due to its “ability to conduct high-profile attacks, recruit fighters, and finance ongoing operations,” but that the group “appears to be a growing threat to U.S. personnel and interests in the region.”