The unstoppable advance of jihadism in the Sahel over the past decade has not only caused thousands of deaths, three million displaced persons and a serious humanitarian crisis. It also erodes the governments of the region and generates enormous political and social instability: the coups d’état in Mali or the recent fall of the government of Burkina Faso are a consequence of the security crisis which is also expressed in spontaneous demonstrations against authorities. Taking advantage of these weaknesses, the radicals’ strategy is to gain more and more ground and advance towards the northern regions of the countries of the Gulf of Guinea such as Côte d’Ivoire, where the attacks are no longer a novelty, or from Benin and Togo, who suffered. serious raids in the past month.

Sunday November 14. At dawn, dozens of jihadists on motorcycles and trucks To recover They raided the gendarmerie station in Inata, in the remote north of Burkina Faso, and killed 53 police officers. Subsequent reports reveal officers were running out of everything, including food. After weeks of constant attacks and half a thousand agents killed in six years, Inata is the last straw. Thousands of Burkinabés demonstrated in the main cities to denounce the inaction of the authorities overwhelmed by the terrorist threat and, against the backdrop of rumors of the exhaustion of the armed forces and even of a coup, President Roch Marc Cristian Kaboré sacked the whole government in an attempt to save its own head.

The spread of jihadist activities threatens not only democracy, but the very existence of the state in Burkina Faso, warns Gilles Yabi, director of the Wathi analysis center. “This has already happened in Mali since 2012, where the deterioration of security and the inability to respond have opened the door to coups d’état. This scenario must be avoided by all means in Burkina Faso ”, he assures us.

In March 2012, Malian soldiers, furious at the lack of arms and ammunition to deal with the radical insurgency that was beginning to erupt in the north of the country, rose up against then-president Amadou Toumani Touré. Eight years later, in August 2020, a group of colonels tired of seeing their soldiers die in the north and center of the country jumped on the bandwagon of popular discontent to carry out a new coup that overthrew Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

“The destabilization of governments in the Sahel is a palpable consequence of the activity of armed groups,” explains Ornella Moderan, researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). “In Burkina Faso, we are witnessing a struggle between the Groupement de support à l’islam et aux Muslims (JNIM) and the Islamic State of the Great Sahara (EIGS) to control part of the Burkinabè territory, which at the same time serves as a corridor. to coastal countries ”. These two terrorist groups, supported by katibas Locals (groups of combatants) are mainly responsible for the constant attacks and attacks throughout the region. The last one, last Thursday in northern Burkina Faso, killed 41 people.

“Terrorists take advantage of the instability”, recognizes researcher Bakary Sambe, director of the Timbuktu Institute. “Behind the incredible amount of attacks that Burkina Faso is undergoing, there is a strategy of jihadist groups to weaken the presence of the State to continue its expansion towards the countries of the Gulf of Guinea,” he adds. With much of Mali and Burkina Faso already out of state control, this progress is a reality. On November 9, a military post in Togo suffered a terrorist attack, the first in its history, and at the beginning of December two bases of the Beninese army suffered the same fate. Skirmishes are common in northern Côte d’Ivoire. In all cases, the attackers came from neighboring Burkina Faso.

“The countries of the Gulf of Guinea have had time to work on prevention and they have not done so because they are installed in the denial of the problem, as if it were a distant affair, or in an exclusively military approach instead of trying to fight the causes. Deep. Sooner or later, as has already happened in central Mali or northern Burkina Faso with the Fulani ethnic group, this approach will accentuate conflicts and community stigmatization, ”explains Sambe, for whom the weakness of unprepared states to an asymmetric conflict like this “obviously benefits the jihadists to continue their advance.”

The spread of jihadism towards the Gulf of Guinea was one of the main concerns of the recent Forum on Peace and Security held in Dakar. Senegalese President Macky Sall, host of the meeting and next president of the African Union in 2022, spoke of “metastases”. Researchers agree that these countries are already a source of supply and funding for terrorist groups, but it goes much further. A recent report from the ISS highlights how artisanal gold mining, which is very difficult to control by states, is already generating income for armed groups and warns against the existence of risks of jihadist contagion to Senegal, on the southern border with Mali more and more security-related incidents are repeated.

In this context of advancing jihadism, the partial withdrawal of French troops from Operation Barkhane, which will drop from approximately 5,100 soldiers to 3,000 next summer and which has already ceded control of three military bases to the Malian army, aroused the concern of the Sahel countries. “This is a time of great change. Barkhane was the axis on which the entire counterterrorism strategy revolves in the region and we are witnessing a resizing of this military force. It is a mystery to see how the national armies or the G5 of the Sahel are adapting to this change ”, assures Moderan.

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