Blitz Bureau
Having slipped undetected into Mali’s capital weeks ago, the jihadis struck just before dawn prayers. They killed dozens of students at an elite police training academy, stormed Bamako’s airport and set the presidential jet on fire.
The September 17 attack was the most brazen since 2016 in a capital city in the Sahel, a vast arid region stretching across sub-Saharan Africa south of the Sahara Desert, according to a Reuters report published by AIR.
It showed that jihadist groups with links to al Qaeda or Islamic State, whose largely rural insurgency has killed thousands of civilians and displaced millions in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, can also strike at the heart of power.
Overshadowed by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan, conflict in the Sahel rarely garners global headlines, yet it is contributing to a sharp rise in migration from the region towards Europe at a time when antiimmigrant far-right parties are on the rise and some EU states are tightening their borders.
According to the U.N.’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the route to Europe with the steepest rise in numbers this year is via West African coastal nations to Spain’s Canary Islands. IOM data shows the number of migrants arriving in Europe from Sahel countries (Burkina, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal) rose 62 per cent to 17,300 in the first six months of 2024 from 10,700 a year earlier, a rise the UN and the IOM have blamed on conflict and climate change.
Fifteen diplomats and experts told Reuters the swathes of territory under jihadist control also risk becoming training grounds and launchpads for more attacks on major cities such as Bamako, or neighbouring states and Western targets, in the region or beyond.
