The rising tension highlights two related, and disturbing, trends spreading across the Sahel
, a vegetable seller perched on a stool in Niamey, the capital of Niger, does not look like a fighter. Yet at the mention of threats by Niger’s neighbours to use force to reinstate Mohamed Bazoum, the president who was
in a coup on July 26th, he swells with anger. “If they come here, we [civilians] are going to war alongside the army.” He is outraged that the Economic Community of West African States , the regional bloc, is considering sending troops to battle the junta, even as it has done little to fight the jihadists that he says are the bigger threat. “The regional bloc had threatened to use force if Mr Bazoum were not reinstated by August 6th.
When Niger’s government became the latest to fall, many leaders in the region hoped to halt this contagion of coups, not least because left unchecked it might give ambitious generals in their own armies ideas. Among the most strident is Bola Tinubu, the recently elected president of neighbouring Nigeria and chairperson of. Because he was briefly detained by a junta in 1994 he detests putschists and is understood to want to make opposition to them a cornerstone of Nigeria’s foreign policy.
Yet the junta in Niger has allies of its own. The military rulers of Burkina Faso and Mali declared that they would consider any intervention in Niger to be a declaration of war on their own countries. Members of the Nigerien junta have also travelled to Mali where, according to Wassim Nasr, a journalist and researcher, they requested assistance from Wagner, a Russian mercenary group that has operated in Mali since 2021.
Sending troops into Niger in a similar fashion would be “madness”, argues Yvan Guichaoua, a Sahel expert at the University of Kent. This is because it is too late to mount a targeted operation to free Mr Bazoum, while a wider war could further destabilise both Niger and northern Nigeria.troops cross the border. Yet if they do resist, the region’s troops may find themselves stuck in a three-way fight between the junta’s forces and the jihadists.
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