34 - Menacing the Sahel: Jihadists and Russians

            Russian mercenaries are killing wantonly in Africa as well as in Ukraine. Human Rights Watch and other international and local humanitarian groups blame the Wagner Group, allied with Putin, for a massacre last week near the town of Moura, south of Timbuktu in central Mali. Between 300 and 400 civilians and Islamist fighters lost their lives during a raid on a jihadist stronghold; Malian soldiers were also involved, but Wagnerites took the lead and shot into gatherings that may or may not have been replete with jihadists.  Russia (naturally) blocked a proposed UN investigation of the assault on Moura.

            The Wagner Group, allied to Putin through Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy catering entrepreneur who seems to have built the Wagner Group and its activities in Libya, Central Africa, Sudan, and Mali at the behest of Putin and Putin’s imperial ambitions, was sent to Mali to shore up the regime of Col. Assimi Goita, a serial coup leader who ousted an elected president in 2021 and assumed control of the country. He also led an earlier coup in 2020, but then turned the country back to civilians.

            Now the Wagnerites secure Goita’s hold on Mali, and restrain other pretenders to its proverbial throne.  In exchange, the Wagnerites loot, and extort from villagers and profitable manufacturing concerns alike. But whether they can keep Malians, especially Bantu-speaking southerners and farmers, safe from attack by jihadists is not yet known.

            After the Arab Spring and Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi’s demise, weapons of war, especially small arms, became surplus in Tripoli and Benghazi.  They rapidly found new owners among Tuareg pastoralists who live in Libya, Algeria, and northern Mali.  Others with connections to the arid zone of northern Mali that stretches north into the Sahara Desert also took up arms. They included adherents of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) and, more recently, a branch of the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara (ISIS).

            Those groups, first cooperatively and then fractiously, went to war against the weak Malian state. In 2012-2013, first Tuareg rebels and then adherents of al-Qaeda and ISIS overran the northern towns of Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu. When the success of Arabs professing loyalty to Islam and imposing the sharia code on the northern cities became apparent, and the intellectual treasures and manuscripts of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Timbuktu were destroyed and fundamentalism imposed, the government of Mali called in a French contingent, eventually of 5500 persons, to beat back the jihadists and free Mali’s arid north.

French legionnaires and paratroopers ousted Tuareg and Algerian Islamists from northern Malian cities and towns and pushed these self-declared revolutionaries back mostly into the southern Sahara. There they regrouped, the Tuareg essentially retuning to nomadic pursuits and the Arab remaining factions affiliating themselves to AQIM and subsequently to ISIS.  Today both derive at least some of their separate financial backing and “legitimacy” from central al-Qaeda and from central ISIS.

            In recent years, AQIM has become a persistent low-level threat to northern Mali, northern Burkina Faso, and northwestern Niger (especially west of Agadez). American and French patrols have been attacked and much of that sub-Saharan region subjected to episodes of violent terror. 

            To curtail AQIM, the United States constructed a large drone aerodrome near Agadez and sent small numbers of U. S. Special Forces to help the Nigeriens strengthen their ability to pursue AQIM operatives.  Meanwhile, the French until this year helped the Malian army curtail depredations north of Timbuktu and kept close watch on jihadist movements in the Algerian Sahara.

            Now that Mali is employing Russian mercenaries, however, France is leaving Mali and all of its bases. Goita’s government is encouraging France to go; most French soldiers will in fact shortly depart, but smaller numbers will relocate to Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mauritania. Without French troops, it is difficult to envisage a halt to jihadist offensives against the weak armies of the region and their Russian allies.

            Ultimately, a conclusive victory in this war of terror, as well as in the others, depends on preventing AQIM from continuing to profit from transporting cocaine (from Peru and Columbia, via Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea-Bissau) and other smuggled contraband such as cigarettes, across the Sahara to Algiers and Tunis, and thence to Europe.  Ideological fervor has long since been replaced by the narcotics hustle. AQIM also has made millions of dollars from kidnapping prominent foreigners (including Canadians) and demanding large ransoms. Only by drying up AQIM’s real reason for existence can this insidious branch of Salafist-inspired mayhem be eliminated

            Too little attention has been paid so far by Washington and Paris to curtailing the jihadists’ access to global financial markets, to the sources of their illicit supplies, or to preventing narcotics from being trafficked successfully to Europe.  Instead, the war on terror has become one of sneak attacks or suicide bombings, retaliation, regrouping, and surreptitious maneuvers by enemy and ally.  These terrorists have even managed in recent months to attack cities and kill villagers in Burkina Faso and western Niger. Whether the Russians really want to contribute to a counter-insurgency campaign against combatants who – like the Ukrainians – are mobile and elusive, has yet to be tested.

In order finally to defeat the terrorists, renewed vigilance, and redoubled patrols across the vast desert wastes of Mali and its neighbors, are essential. So is enhanced drone surveillance by the Americans and, later this year, perhaps upgrading the lethal firepower of the drones based near Agadez. Following the money and making insurgency unprofitable and difficult is crucial.  Even so, terror will continue to be a way of life for a small subset of miscreants unless the Russians obstruct the French, the Americans, and local defenders. There is nothing noble or religious in the jihadist pursuit of drug profits, or of their criminal enterprises generally. Nor do the Russians help quell regional conflict.