Saudi, UAE pledge $130M to fight terror
paris — Saudi Arabia has pledged $100 million towards a five-nation anti-terror force in the Sahel region of West Africa, while the United Arab Emirates has offered $30 million, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday.
Macron made the announcement at a meeting to drum up support for the G5 Sahel force, an initiative pooling troops from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
The leaders of the five nations, which are among the world’s poorest, joined Macron and other leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the talks at a chateau in La Celle-Saint-Cloud outside Paris.
Former colonial power France is fighting against militants in West Africa with its 4,000-strong regional Barkhane force, but is keen for the countries affected to take on more responsibility.
“We must win the war against terrorism in the Sahel-Sahara region,” Macron told a press conference after the meeting.
“There are attacks everyday, there are states which are currently in jeopardy... We must intensify our efforts,” he said.
The five nations are among the world’s poorest, and funding was high on the agenda as their presidents joined Macron and other leaders including Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel at a chateau in CelleSaint-Cloud outside Paris.
Macron pushed US President Donald Trump for support when they met in July, and Washington has promised $60 million in aid for the countries.
“It’s an initiative that’s getting more powerful, but speed is a problem,” French Defence Minister Florence Parly told RFI radio.
“We have to go faster,” she said. “The objective is to be able to move forward faster on financing and the military structure.”
US officials were attending Wednesday’s talks along with the prime ministers of Italy and Belgium and representatives of the United Arab Emirates, European Union and African Union.
The International Crisis Group described the G5 force as a European effort to “bring down the expense of their overseas operations by delegating them partially to their African partners”.
“The Sahel is politically and economically strategic, especially for France and Germany, both of which view the region as posing a potential threat to their own security and as a source of migration and terrorism,” it added in a report published on Tuesday.
The ambitious goal is to have a pooled force of 5,000 local troops operational by mid-2018, wresting back border areas from militants including a local Al Qaeda affiliate.
Priority number one is to re-establish law and order in the border zone between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger where several hundred soldiers, backed by French troops, carried out last month’s debut mission.
The task is daunting, not least because the radicals enjoy a degree of support in areas where people’s experience of the state has often been one of inefficacy or outright abuse of power.
In central Mali, Human Rights Watch noted that many villagers “welcomed radical efforts to investigate and punish livestock thieves,” while others “expressed anger at Malian army abuses”. —