88 - The Other Invasions that Kill Innocents: I
Unconnected to Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, equally unprovoked and destructive invasions convulse large swaths of Africa. Islamist militants loyal to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State attack Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger incessantly; al-Qaeda allies keep Somalia, northern Mozambique, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in daily turmoil; Rwandan-backed fighters pillage the eastern Congo; Ethiopia attacks its own citizens in the north; in Cameroon, Ambazonian separatists battle the state; and in populous Nigeria, Islamic State rebels, home-grown bandits, local secessionists, and a host of other armed dissidents disturb the peace.
This post will arrive in two installments, today’s dealing with West Africa, Monday’s with eastern Africa and the Congo
The Sahel
From bases in southern Algeria and Libya, as well as in the countries of the Sahel proper, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (as the local offshoots are called) seem to be cooperating for the first time to create mayhem in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and to send thrusting forays into northern Benin. All of these once peaceful countries are under attack daily. The Islamists are probably making their most successful gains against local ruling governments in Mali, where 2,700 persons were killed between January and July 2022. Almost as many have been killed by jihadists in Burkina Faso over the same period. Niger also suffered extensive human losses during the same six months.
The jihadist successes in Mali replicate assaults by related but different Islamist marauders in 2012, when invaders with Libyan weapons and vehicles swept into northern Mali and even occupied fabled Timbuktu. Those attackers were only repulsed in 2013 by French paratroopers and other soldiers hastily airlifted into the region. German and British detachments also helped to push the Islamists back. Even so, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, over ten years 2.5 million residents ended up displaced.
France devoted more than 5,000 troops and untold billions of Euros to anti-jihadist actions in the Sahel region. Now, thanks to hostility from a new militarily-installed non-democratic junta in Mali, the French are re-locating their local headquarters to friendlier Niger, and cutting their force numbers in half.
The coup leaders in Mali have also obtained military reinforcements from mercenaries belonging to Russia’s Wagner Group. But neither the Malian army nor the Wagnerites have yet managed to stem the jihadist onslaught. Indeed, local independent analysts say that the situation on the ground is worse than in 2013, when Islamists held much of northern Mali.
The Sahel remains today’s global center of al-Qaeda and Islamic State action, albeit with little direct financial or materiel assistance from al-Qaeda central (in Iran) or ISIS central (in Iraq and Syria). Indeed, like nearly all jihadists across the globe, the malefactors in the Sahel and the Sahara fund their depredations by “taxing” locals over whom they have control, by plunder, and by controlling drug and arms-smuggling routes – in this case, north across the Sahara, en route to Europe. The general who led French operations in northern Mali called ISIS in the Sahel a “major gang” of criminals.
Nigeria
The Boko Haram Islamist movement that fought the Nigerian state from 2010 and kidnapped young girls for harem duty now seems to have been superseded in the same northeastern Nigerian venue by an ISIS offshoot, equally murderous, called the Islamic State West Africa Province. This segment of the Islamic State has appropriated Boko Haram’s successful drug trafficking transport routes to finance its own attacks. Like so many other outlaw groups in Nigeria, it also pillages, captures civilians for ransom, and steals crops from villagers.
This ISIS ally joins a host of six or so indigenous criminal gangs bent on kidnappings for ransom, mostly in Nigeria’s northern, Muslim, states, especially Kaduna, Kano, and Sokoto. But bandits also operate on the outskirts of Abuja, the national capital, and attack trains traversing north of Abuja in Plateau State.
To add to Nigeria’s turmoil, local pirates in the Gulf of Guinea steal cargo from arriving ships and siphon oil from captured tankers. A secessionist movement is attempting to resuscitate the Biafra, an Igbo state that warred with the rest of Nigeria from 1967 to 1970.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous polity with well over an official 210 million people – but heading in this century to 430 million – cannot cope with these various insurgencies. Its government talks big, but exerts itself less robustly. That is why others and I call this massive democracy a combustible failed state. Nigeria cannot secure its people, and keep them safe – a fundamental prerequisite of good governance anywhere.
Cameroon
Neighboring Cameroon has been attempting for ten years to squelch a rebellion by 20 percent of its population -- the English speakers who were lumped together with French speakers after World War II to create Cameroon. The English speakers claim discrimination in every aspect of their lives; the Cameroonian state itself is an autocracy run by President Paul Biya, a French-speaker who has run the country, often from a home in Switzerland, for forty years.
The English speakers are fighting to establish a new state that they intend to name Ambazonia, and they battle under that banner against the army of French-speakers that seeks to contain the Ambazonian movement. Nearly 700,000 English-speaking Cameroonians are now internally displaced and another 60,000 have fled into Nigeria. A separatist leader was ambushed and killed last month.
If Putin’s war were easing in Ukraine it would be much easier for the West to assist home grown democratic forces in the Sahel to contain jihadists and to help mediate in and help bring the Nigerian and Cameroonian conflicts to an end. But all attention rightfully remains on Ukraine while these deadly confrontations continue, almost out of sight of a world focused on Putin’s depredations.
Continued on Monday