An opinion poll showed for the first time that the majority of French people oppose the operation in the Sahel
Credit: GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO/AFP
France is scrambling to shore up support from European and African allies in its eight-year fight against the fastest jihadist insurgency on earth at a critical summit.
Paris has hinted it wants to withdraw some of its soldiers from the Sahel and see European special forces take up the slack as part of a taskforce to assist Mali and Burkina Faso that is struggling to take shape.
The news comes after Britain ruled out sending more troops to the Sahel. “There are no plans to boost the deployment,” Ben Wallace, the UK’s Defence Secretary told The Telegraph on a recent visit to a British military base in Kenya. “My eyes are wide open about what we can expect. And also, my aim is quite clear. I’m not into staying there forever.”
Last year, the UK sent 250 frontline troops to shore up the beleaguered UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, which is struggling to hold back a tide of violence spreading across the Sahel, a vast arid region south of the Sahara desert.
Battle for Sahel: Locator map
The mission is the most dangerous British deployment since Afghanistan and the largest contribution to a peacekeeping mission since Bosnia.
The UK blue helmets joined three RAF Chinook helicopters and 90 military personnel who have been supporting France’s 5,100-man counter-insurgent mission, operation Barkhane, since 2019.
Emmanuel Macron last month signalled his intention to reduce the French force but said he would wait a couple of months after the N’Djamena summit which is due to take place next week to see results from France’s African allies in fighting terrorism.
“[I]f you want to make a useful impact, you have to think that if there are still terrorist groups after seven years, that means they are embedded, and your problem is not simply one of security. It’s a political, ethnic and development problem. So at that point, I will adjust our contingent,” he said.
Battle for Sahel: Major threats and security operations in the region
An opinion poll published last month showed for the first time that the majority of French people – some 51 percent – oppose the operation in the Sahel. This has put pressure on Mr Macron to consider a withdrawal before a 2022 presidential election.
“We can’t keep putting our soldiers’ lives at risk,” warned Christian Cambon, head of the French Senate’s foreign affairs and defence committee. “We need to find a political solution of national reconciliation and the means to get out of this operation.”
This week, Florence Parly, the French defence minister, said that France could not rule out changing the terms of the intervention.
Fifty seven French soldiers have died in the Sahel since 2013, when ethnic rebels and allied jihadists swept out of the Sahara and conquered half of Mali. French forces and Chadian commandos intervened to drive the insurgents back into the desert.
At first, the operation was deemed a major success. But over the past eight years, jihadist groups allied to al-Qaeda and Isil in the Middle East have spread across porous borders into Burkina Faso and Niger, turning once peaceful communities at each other’s throats.
The ensuing violence has cost the lives of thousands and forced more than a million to flee their homes.
A self-defence group in Poessin village in the once-safe African nation of Burkina Faso
Credit: Simon Townsley
Analysts say France is now caught between a rock and a hard place, facing accusations of neo-colonialism on the ground while conceding that if it pulled out, the area could turn into a new Somalia.
The head of France’s DGSE spy service, Bernard Emié, warned that the Sahel was the cornerstone of the West’s fight to prevent Islamists running amok in the Gulf of Guinea, into countries like Ivory Coast, Benin and Ghana.
While several top local jihadists had been liquidated in recent months, “the beast still moves”, he said.
“The stated aim of Sahel terrorists is to stage terror attacks in the West and in Europe in particular. September 11, 2001 was prepared in an Afghan valley. November 13, 2015 [the Paris attacks] was conceived in the streets of Raqqa,” Mr Emié added.
As well as suffering a spate of recent battlefield casualties in the Sahel, France is struggling to impose itself in a separate information war being waged for public opinion.
Anti-French sentiment is rampant in Mali and Burkina Faso. On the streets of Bamako, Mali’s capital, many believe that France is actually trying to keep the country weak so the former colonial power can exploit secret gold and oil reserves in the Sahara.
Malians protest against France in the capital Bamako, Mali Jan 2021
Credit: HADAMA DIAKITE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Scrutiny intensified at the start of the year after an airstrike in the remote central Malian village of Bounti, which the French army says killed dozens of jihadists.
But local civil society groups and several witnesses said the airstrike hit a wedding and killed 19 civilians, making it a possible war crime. The area is known for being overrun by jihadists and impossible for journalists to access, making the claims of both sides difficult to verify.
“All the testimonies point towards a blunder,” said Aguibou Bouaré, the director of Mali’s National Commission for Human Rights. Several international human rights groups and military experts also told The Telegraph the reports of civilian casualties were credible.
Investigators from MINUSMA, the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Mali, conducted a fact-finding mission on the ground and are due to release a report in two weeks, but France has so far refused to publish images filmed by a drone ahead of the strike or to open its own investigation.
Dr Hamadoune Dicko, the youth president of Mali’s largest Fulani association and the first to raise the alarm about civilian deaths in Bounti, is one of many who have called for the drone images to be released.
He lost a friend in the attack, Boura Iddara Diallo, a 46-year-old sheep trader, whose nephew was getting married, he says.
“We knew there was a wedding in Bounti. When the strike took place, my father called me to tell me my friend had been killed in an airstrike. When jihadists are being hit we don’t say anything. But when it is civilians who are killed, we have to acknowledge it,” he said.
For its part, France has pointed the finger at “foreign powers” for spreading fake news.
“We’re not just talking about rumours spread by local players,” said Ms Parly. “Russia and Turkey are used to using these methods.”
“We didn’t hit a wedding. Two Mirages took off on very precise intelligence and bombed a terrorist group,” a French defence source told The Telegraph this week.
“We saw false claims from foreign accounts showing dead fighters who turned out to be victims of Boko Haram dating back to 2014. The unverified claims change each time the French defence ministry provides more details, including quite precise intel on the location of the strike. This suggests there is a clear desire to change the reality of the facts.”
France-led Barkhane Taskforce Takuba – a multinational military mission made up of soldiers from France, Estonia, Czech Republic and Sweden
Credit: DAPHNE BENOIT/AFP
A UN report on the disputed airstrike on Bounti has been delayed and will only come out in two weeks – well after the G5 Sahel summit.
Over the past few years, there has been a growing consensus amongst many analysts and officials that the war on terrorism in the Sahel is unwinnable and the only way to restore peace to the region is to open negotiation with some of the jihadist groups.
In the past year, both Mali and Burkina Faso have shown their willingness to open such talks. However, France has been opposed to opening dialogues with the most extreme groups, like the Al Qaeda umbrella group, Nusrat-al-Islam (JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.
This week, the Elysée confirmed it would continue to target high-value jihadists who answered to Isil or Al Qaeda. It said the summit would focus on a “diplomatic and political surge” as well as a “return of the state” to lawless areas where jihadists had been beaten back and the revival of the dormant 2015 Algiers peace accord.
Speaking last month to The Telegraph in Kenya, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, Chief of Staff of the British army, warned of the dangers the Sahelian jihadist groups posed to the UK.
“The Sahel represents a huge swath of ungoverned space. And what we’ve really learned over the last 20 years or so is that without security forces problems can incubate in those areas and if you act early and decisively you have a much better opportunity to stem a potential lethal tide of threats. And you are much better tackling those upstream.
“What you see across the Sahel is a proliferation of extremist armed groups and they represent most immediately a threat to that region. And our belief is they might at some point exploit that [position] and represent a threat to the United Kingdom,” General Carleton-Smith added.
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