Sahel's grim future poses no easy answers for the West

By Gwynne Dyer

Three landlocked countries in the heart of the Sahel rank among the world's poorest performers on nearly every measure that matters. Literacy sits below half even among the young. GDP per capita runs at less than $100 a month. Life expectancy hovers around 60 years, compared to the low 80s in most developed countries except the United States. Together, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso account for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths worldwide.

They sit jammed together like jigsaw pieces in the Sahel, the strip of the Sahara that didn't fully dry out when the rest turned to open desert about 5,000 years ago. To be born in any of them, for the vast majority, is to be born poor.

These countries rarely make the news because poverty isn't news. When they do, it's usually for military coups: Mali in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, Niger in 2023. Each brought young military officers to power. Nobody cared, not even Ecowas, the Economic Community of West African States, which is supposed to defend democracy.

Eighty million people across three penniless countries are now ruled by ambitious, overconfident young officers whose skills rarely extend beyond small-unit tactics. All three countries face Islamist armed groups seeking absolute power and ethnic minorities who feel oppressed. What could possibly go wrong?

They've already tried foreign powers as props. First came troops from France, the former colonial ruler, all eventually expelled. Then a tangle of military missions from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States, most also thrown out.

Now it's mercenaries from what Moscow calls the Africa Corps, originally the Wagner Group: 2,500 Russian contractors in Mali and roughly 300 each in Niger and Burkina Faso. The latter two groups mostly serve as bodyguards to the ruling juntas. In Mali, they're in combat, and doing badly.

Last week, the Russians in Mali were hit by two forces at once: ethnic Tuareg separatists fighting for the independence of Azawad in northern Mali, and the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), the local al-Qaeda affiliate. Their alliance is probably temporary but has nearly overwhelmed the junta that claims to be in charge.

According to the Russian defence ministry, its mercenaries defeated a Western-backed coup and gallantly defended the northern city of Kidal from JNIM fighters for a full day and night "while completely surrounded and vastly outnumbered" before withdrawing with honour. If Michael Caine had been available, they could have reshot the film Zulu with real guns.

The Malian junta, the Russians' paymasters, tells a different story. They say the governor of Kidal warned the Russians an attack was coming three days in advance, but the mercenaries used the time to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal. Discretion may be the better part of valour, but that's not what the Malians were paying for.

The rebel offensive also killed the defence minister and the head of military intelligence. Most of the country's north will likely now become a no-go zone for the regime. The Tuareg separatists will work to rouse their fellow tribesmen in Niger to rebellion, while JNIM tries to carve out a mini-Islamic state across other parts of the north.

JNIM has now set up checkpoints on every road into Bamako, the capital, a city of three million. The collapse could come faster than expected. Le Monde suggests Mali is on the brink of becoming "a kind of African Afghanistan."

So what should be done?

Nothing, preferably. This is a region doomed to severe suffering for generations, and foreign military intervention will only deepen it. Humanitarian aid, yes, but it's a bottomless pit.

Professional strategists can find plausible reasons, for a fee, why almost any patch of ground on the planet is strategically important. Even they struggle with the Sahel. It's not on the road to anywhere. Its resources are minimal. Its internal conflicts are vast. Its poverty is rocket fuel for Islamist extremists.

Parts of the Sahel remain viable, including Senegal and northern Nigeria. But the heart of the region is a lost cause. In Mali and Niger, half the population is under 15.

Enough said.