The forgotten Sahel: home to a simmering crisis on the edge of Europe

There were two attacks on Ivory Coast army posts on Burkina Faso border this week. Three soldiers, and two attackers (thought to be from Burkina Faso), were killed. So far – so far away country about which we know little.

It also little known that the British Army is deployed in the region. Around 250 troops from the Light Dragoons and the Royal Anglian Regiment are in Mali, where the French have close to 6,000 soldiers fighting in the Sahel – home to the world’s fastest growing insurgency. The UK also has three RAF Chinook helicopter and 100 support staff there to support French operations. The attacks were further proof that the conflict threatens to spill into the states on the Gulf of Guinea, and further north into Gambia and Senegal.

The Sahel is the vast scrubland at the southern edge of the Sahara, where the vultures of Al-Qaeda and ISIS now prey on suffering and division. Some  3.5 million people have been displaced and growing numbers leave one of the world’s poorest and environmentally damaged places and head to one of the richest – Europe.  The conflicts raging across several countries have been smouldering for decades. Now they are ablaze. International terror groups have hijacked local insurgencies and the violence threatens to spread instability. 

For example – the Tuareg people in northern Mali have always had issues with the peoples from the south of the country. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi signed up thousands of Tuareg men as mercenaries in his army. When he was overthrown in 2011, they headed home, taking with them heavy weapons looted from military bases. Within a year Mali was in turmoil; within two so was the Sahel as the violence exploded across borders, engulfing Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania and Niger. The UN Stabilization Mission set up in 2013, has the highest UN peacekeeping mission casualty rate in the world.

The British military is in Mali as ‘peacekeepers’, but that’s how they went to Afghanistan and that soon changed. However, there’s little appetite in Whitehall to up the numbers and the UK is happy for the French to be taking the lead. France has also taken the lead in fatalities among the European militaries operating within the UN mission: 50 French soldiers are among more than 420 UN and associated personal killed by IEDs, ambushes, suicide attacks, and rocket fire since the French first intervened.

The British contingent is tasked with long range reconnaissance missions using its Jackal 2 vehicles which, when carrying extra fuel, can take the four-man crew 800 kilometres without being resupplied at speeds of up to 80kph. They have a heavy machine gun, a smoke grenade launcher to screen it in case of attack, and run flat tyres. Ahead of their first patrol in February the Light Dragoons Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Robinson, said the unit was “highly trained, very well-equipped and well-armed….We are well rehearsed and practised, and I’m more than confident that anyone who decides to ambush us or try and take us on toe-to-toe is going to come off second best.”

That’s probably true, but the Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliated groups operating in the same territory are unlikely to go toe to toe. Large numbers of fighters do sometimes appear out of the vast ungoverned spaces and overwhelm government army bases, but the biggest danger to the British patrols is probably from IEDs. 

Five French soldiers have already been killed this year in two separate IED attacks which hit their armoured vehicles. The Jackal 2s has modern armour, a V shaped hull to deflect a blast, wheels designed to break off (further absorbing the force) and technology which reduces the height a vehicle can be thrown into the air. They are an improvement on the Jackal 1 in which several British soldiers and Marines were killed in Afghanistan. Perhaps their greatest strength though is their off-road ability meaning they can avoid busy routes which would be susceptible to IED attacks. 

That is at the sharp end of the UKs military commitment to the Sahel and likely to be its limit, even though France and the 5 Sahel nations ask for more. The experiences in Iraq and Libya mean the UK public would probably be hostile to greater military involvement, and politicians are hardly champing at the bit to make the case for it.

Because what happens in the Sahel doesn’t stay in the Sahel, a case can be made that preventing Mali and others from becoming failed states is in the UK’s interest and worth fighting for. It would be a hard sell. What might get more attention is if the levels of instability there do spread into countries with which the UK has historical ties – Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia and Sierra Leone. The recent attacks in Ivory Coast, and others last year, show that potential to be real.

For now, with the worst of the violence in the ‘Francophone’ sphere, the bulk of the effort to support the beleaguered regional governments will still fall to the French. They appear to be stuck in their own ‘forever war’.  For Paris it’s Catch Vingt-Deux.  Even after eight years, it’s clear that creating stability will require years more effort.  Yet the longer they stay, the more hostility may grow, along with the casualty rate on all sides.