Alain Antil, director of the Sub-Saharan Africa Center at IFRI, lecturer at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lille and in Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne answers questions from franceinfo Afrique on terrorism in the Sahel, where “the security situation varies greatly from country to country”. The researcher coordinated the Sahel dossier of the journal Foreign politic.
franceinfo Africa: terrorist groups were absent from the Sahel 20 years ago. How did we go from a tolerant Marabout Islam to this radical and violent Islamism?
Alain Antil : in the Sahelian strip, there are two original centers: northern Mali, with the establishment from Algeria of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) which subsequently became Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and northeastern Nigeria with the Sunni Preaching and Jihad Group, better known as Boko Haram. Some groups out of bounds with these two movements declared their rallying to the Islamic State (IS) in the second part of the 2000s.
Here is for the groups present and their origins. However, it is important to understand through the short history of these two centers that we do not only have in the Sahel an “imported terrorism” or piloted from the outside, but that this violence must be placed in the histories. national politics and religion.
Even if it is true that Sahelian Islam is “worked” by outside influences – Wahhabism in particular –, we must not forget that these jihadist fighters refer to a “glorious regional past”, the creation in the nineteenth century of several theocratic states, such as the Caliphate of Sokoto or the Empire of Macina (also called the Diina).
The political project carried by these terrorists is therefore to bring down the Sahelian states that exist in order to build instead a political order connected to an Islamic frame of reference.
Do the armed Islamist groups linked to Al Qaeda or ISIS continue to recruit despite the blows struck against them, in particular against their leaders? How do they cope with the shock?
What actually strikes observers is the great resilience of these movements. Operation Barkhane, for example, has neutralized, over the past two years, the majority of senior officials of the Islamic State in the Grand Sahara (EIGS), present in Mali, western Niger and Burkina Faso, without doing so. disappear this movement.
To fully understand the jihadist dynamic in the area, it must be understood that we are not dealing with a large coherent front but with dozens of small very localized hotbeds of tension, and that at one point, a jihadist group may come and support one of the stakeholders – Fulani herders against Dogon farmers, for example. The jihadist group can thus establish itself in a new territory and allow the populations who join it to rely on its strike force to resolve their problems.
What attracts young recruits: money, Islamist ideology, social desperation?
There are several main motivations for joining these groups, notably politico-religious; to a first nucleus of ideologized combatants are added “logisticians” who know the terrain very well. There are also unemployed young people who can receive regular remuneration and young people who want to protect their community. The last two categories are by far the most numerous.
/2022/01/11/phpr9hsa9.jpg)
How do its armed groups finance themselves? Are they linked to the region’s multiple trafficking: drugs, weapons, fake medicines, etc. ?
First, even if it is often mentioned, it seems that “external financing” – from the Gulf in particular – are widely fantasized. It is obviously always possible that funds arriving in local NGOs could ultimately supplement certain groups, but this remains extremely secondary. There are three main sources of funding for these groups: ransoms (men but also animals), trafficking (groups can sometimes participate in the organization of trafficking, but most often, they earn money by securing convoys or, even more frequently, by levying taxes on the circulation of these products) and levying taxes on the populations living in the conquered areas. Little is said about them because they are rural areas, but the phenomenon is massive.
If the presence of Barkhane, the Minusma (United Nations force) and the local armies has made it possible for a decade to contain the threat, no military victory on the ground seems in sight. Why ?
The Sahelian States are not very present in certain parts of their territories, the populations feel neglected and, above all, not at all protected. In Mali in particular, many armed groups (jihadists and non-jihadists) are present, as well as more or less well armed self-defense militias. Seen from the outside, the Sahel’s problem is thought to be terrorism, but in reality it is one of the problems. Over the past three years, civilian victims linked to terrorism in the Sahel represent between 30 and 40% of all victims, the others are killed by self-defense militias and repression carried out by national armies.
Barkhane and Minusma have specific intervention mandates. Barkhane has had excellent results with regard to the objectives that were initially set for him, but the configuration of the conflict has changed considerably since 2014, Barkhane fights in close collaboration with the national armies against terrorist movements, but obviously has no legitimacy to intervene in inter-community conflicts.
The significant losses in the ranks of the Malian and Burkinabè armies show that they are still not level. What’s the problem ?
In the Sahel, the security situation varies greatly from country to country. Mauritania, Senegal and Chad have, in recent years, been virtually spared from terrorism. Niger is struggling on two fronts (south-east and west) with difficulty, but its security forces are facing it. In Mali and Burkina Faso, the security services (army and police) have almost collapsed. In these two countries and in Niger, corruption, the embezzlement of massive funds and material explain a catastrophic situation. Finally, the armies are often undersized (around 18,000 soldiers in Mali) in relation to the size of the territories to be secured.
Is it because of this “collapse” of the Malian army that the junta called on Wagner’s Russian soldiers? What to expect?
According to various reports, it seems that the deployment of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner company, which has been talked about for months, has started in recent days. Faced with the growing divergence with France and the gradual withdrawal of Barkhane, the junta in power in Bamako opts for new alliances, at the risk of losing its traditional support. This development shows that the Malian government, due to the weakness of its army, has no other strategy than to entrust other countries with security tasks. It is likely that the mercenaries, in addition to fighting the terrorists, also come to secure the power of the Malian junta, but this is only a hypothesis, as Bamako communicated very little about the contract with Wagner.
Is there a real threat of spreading Islamist terrorism to the coastal countries of West Africa: Ivory Coast, Togo, Ghana?
For Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, these are no longer hypothetical threats because there have already been several attacks. The other areas where we could have worrying developments are the north-west of Nigeria, the north of Togo and Ghana as well as the Senegalese-Malian border.