The Sahel: Secret things to referred to as security crisis spirals

The Sahel is a mostly dry area on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert that spans many African countries.

Different maps show different parts of the Sahel, but a common one goes from northern Senegal on the Atlantic Ocean coast to parts of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and finally to Sudan and Eritrea in the Red Sea.

Lots of Deals Many countries in the Sahel have been dealing with harsh weather events that cause repeated dry spells that hurt the people who live in these areas that are not well developed yet.

Recently, parts of the western Sahel have also been in the news around the world because of a “fireball of conflict” involving many armed groups, military projects by national armies and foreign partners, and regional militias.

In 2012, a coalition of separatist and armed groups took over northern Mali. This caused France, a former colonial power, to send troops to stop the groups from moving toward Bamako, the capital, and stopping the fall of the Malian state as a whole.

However, fighting has gotten a lot worse lately because armed groups have spread their reach and are recruiting from a wider range of challenge, ethnic, and ideological groups.

There are a lot of non-state armed groups in the area, but the two main ones responsible for some very creative attacks in the last few years have been the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), which is linked to al-Qaeda, and Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM).

Aside from Boko Haram, other groups operating in the area are Ansarul Islam, Plateforme, Ansar al-Din, and al-Mourabitoun.

The UN says that attacks in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have five times risen since 2016. In 2015, more than 4,000 people were killed in the border areas between the three countries that were hit the hardest.

As attacks on civilians rise in number and regularity, the violence at the center of the disagreement has actually caused a major humanitarian crisis.

The United Nations says that over 700,000 people in Burkina Faso have had to leave their homes in the past year. Tens of thousands of people in Mali and Niger have also been forced to leave their homes, and many schools have been closed.

Foreign forces let go

Despite having soldiers from the G5 Sahel region (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger), the international military force that started working in 2017 has had a hard time stopping the violence. This is because it has had problems with funding and coordinating its efforts.

Early in February, France, on the other hand, announced that it was sending an extra 600 soldiers to join its current 4,500-strong objective.

It came after a France-G5 Sahel summit in January, where leaders agreed to move forward with a new structure that would bring the two groups’ forces under one command, help with joint operations, and make it easier to share information.

During the summit in Pau, French President Emmanuel Macron also asked his counterparts to make it clear that they stood by their decision for France to join the military, even though there was growing anti-French sentiment in some countries and the security situation was quickly getting worse.

People are more angry than ever that French and UN forces have not been able to stop the violence. This is because people think that human rights are being violated, including by killing people without a reason, during military actions by the across-the-country armies in the area.

Some aid groups have also said that the military response in the area is “part of the problem.” Others have warned that social and economic problems must also be fixed in order to stop the crisis.

Leaders of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a group of countries in West Africa, announced a billion-dollar plan in September to help fight armed groups.

Because of problems in many West African countries that have also been attacked, the money is set to last from 2020 to 2024.