Sahel

The fraught process of raising finance for the G5 Sahel joint military task force cleared another hurdle on 23 February when a summit in Brussels raised cash pledges worth €12...

Important organisational and financial matters may remain unresolved, but the G5 Sahel countries' new joint military force is preparing to launch Opération Pagnali regardless. It w...

The intervention of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and last-minute wording tweaks finally enabled France to overcome United States and British caution and...

A string of Islamist attacks in Mali and Niger are another reminder of the limitations of the efforts at political and security reform of the past five years. The latest thinking i...

Foreign ministers from the Sahel Group of Five – Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad – have just held a joint high-level meeting with United Nations officials in the mar...

Regional and international moves to resist the jihadists – and to stifle their appeal – in the Sahel and Sahara regions are proliferating but enjoying far from smooth p...

Lake Chad once sustained a large population through irrigation and fishing in Cameroon, Niger, Chad and Nigeria. Now, just a tenth of its former size, it is only a small lake strad...

A report to the United Nations Security Council paints an alarming picture of Sahelian countries being severely stressed by the 420,000 returnees who have fled Libya since the begi...

As the ‘Arab Spring’ plays out across North Africa and the Middle East, the national uprisings are not only arousing new fear among ruling elites but also changing the shape of reg...

The kidnapping of five French people on 16 September is a wake-up call to the European Union about crime in the Sahel belt – terrorism; the trade in drugs, arms and people; banditr...