Jihadists Are Advancing in Western Africa
Islamist militant attacks are wreaking havoc in West Africa. An insurgency that began in northern Mali in 2012 has spread to neighboring Burkina Faso and is threatening coastal states including Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast. Hundreds have died in recent months. Increased defense spending weighs heavily on the budgets of some of the world’s poorest countries. Gold mining, a crucial source of income for Mali and Burkina Faso, is also being affected.
Mainly continuing instability in Mali and, further afield, in Libya, where turmoil has opened up smuggling routes and access to weapons. A French military intervention in 2013 dealt a heavy blow to jihadist groups that partnered with ethnic Tuareg rebels to seize control of northern Mali a year earlier. Deprived of their urban bases, the jihadists resorted to bombings and hit-and-run attacks, targeting army posts and the 15,000-person United Nations peacekeeping mission.
They extended their operations to Burkina Faso, where a state of emergency in several border regions has done little to improve security. There have also been intermittent attacks in Niger, including a high-profile ambush in 2017 that claimed the lives of four American soldiers. The jihadists have exploited and fueled age-old tensions between farmers and cattle herders who compete for land and scarce resources in Mali, Burkina Faso and Nigeria, recruiting members of aggrieved communities to their cause.
There are numerous militants in the region and the line between jihadist and non-jihadist groups is often unclear. The oldest and best-known jihadist organization is al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which operates in the Sahara desert and the Sahel, an adjacent semi-arid zone to the south. Originally formed under a different name to fight Algeria’s secular government in the 1990s, the organization aligned with al-Qaeda in the 2000s and helped Tuareg rebels capture northern Mali. In 2017, four groups -- AQIM, Ansar Dine, an offshoot called the Macina Liberation Movement and Al Mourabitoune -- announced that they had joined forces under the banner the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, known by its acronym JNIM.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-14/how-the-jihadists-are-advancing-in-western-africa-quicktake-k2yin4hu?srnd=premium
