West Africa scrambles to halt jihadists’ advance
‘If the heat is turned up on the jihadists in Burkina Faso they will seek to regroup in Ghana’
‘You have ... all the perfect elements, from criminality to marginalisation and local grievances, for jihadists to exploit’
Jihadists who have brought bloodshed to the Sahel are advancing rapidly on four previously unaffected states in West Africa, threatening to open a new front in their insurgency. Security officials in the Gulf of Guinea say that under-resourced, undermanned and often ill-prepared armies in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Benin and Togo are involved “in a race against time” to protect their frontiers.
All four states border Burkina Faso, where groups affiliated to al-qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) have launched a bloody and stunningly effective campaign that has swept throughout a country regarded until recently as among the most stable in West Africa.
In recent weeks, the jihadists have begun to test the country’s borders with its southern neighbours, raising fears in Western capitals that an already serious crisis is about to evolve into a far broader regional conflagration.
Last month, suspected militants based in Burkina Faso raided a police station just inside Benin, while a security source in Ghana said that Islamist groups were now carrying out attacks within three miles of Ghanaian territory.
“They are steadily pushing south from Burkina Faso,” he said. “It is worrying. We have porous borders and we believe that if the heat is turned up on the jihadists in Burkina Faso they will seek to regroup in Ghana.”
Britain is already being drawn ever deeper into the Sahel crisis.
It has deployed three heavy-lift Chinook helicopters and nearly 100 personnel to support France’s counter-terrorist mission in the Sahel, a vast stretch of arid scrubland on the southern fringe of the Sahara. It will send 250 more to join the UN’S force in Mali in the coming months.
But any jihadist infiltration into Ghana would raise pressure on Britain to play a much more decisive role in what has, so far, been a French-led response to the crisis.
The three Sahelian states at the centre of the insurgency – Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso – are all former French colonies, as are three of the latter’s four southern neighbours. Until 1957, Ghana was the British colony of the Gold Coast.
Just as in the Sahel, none of the Gulf of Guinea states are thought to be anywhere near ready to beat back Islamist groups that have carried out hundreds of attacks on military and civilian targets alike, killing thousands of people a year.
Britain has taken a leading role, alongside France, the United States and Israel, in helping Ghana develop a special forces capability, the Ghanaian source said.
Last week, British officers also joined Flintlock, an annual Pentagon-sponsored exercise to train 15 African armies in counterterrorism techniques.
Given the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Sahel, where the number of attacks has increased fivefold since 2016, this year’s manoeuvres, held in the Senegalese town of Thies and in the desert state of Mauritania, took on an added urgency.
For Gulf of Guinea states there is not only terror about what their armies may soon be facing, but concern, too, that America could be abandoning them to the fight.
Even as Britain and France step up their presence in the region, the Trump administration says it is considering substantial cuts to its military presence as well as ending aid to the French Sahelian mission, Operation Barkhane.
Whatever happens, Western military trainers at Flintlock say that training and equipping Sahelian armies is vital to winning the battle on the African front of the war on terror.
Ultimately, western forces will not be able to leave the region until local armies are strong enough to take the battle to the foe. British officers talk of seeking “to learn the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq”.
“The solution is going to be local,” says Brigadier Gus Fair, the commander of the Specialised Infantry Group, a British Army unit that trains foreign forces. The brigadier echoes the mantra of the American officers, “African solutions to African problems”.
But the challenges facing local armies were painfully on display during a training exercise for special forces soldiers from Burkina Faso at Flintlock in Thies last week.
Under orders to attack a jihadist camp then capture or kill a preidentified terrorist commander and recover documents with key intelligence in his office, the soldiers mixed up north and south, captured the wrong man and forgot the intelligence documents.
Such mistakes could happen in any training mission; in the heat of the moment, even the best British or American soldiers might slip up. But typically such exercises are repeated up to six times. The Burkinabe soldiers got to do it just once, given the time-constraints of the instructors working with so many armies.
Amid a growing terror of being overwhelmed, Sahelian states have announced massive army recruitment drives. Given the scale of the slaughter, persuading volunteers to join is far from easy, however.
Instead, some states are increasingly relying on outsourcing the war to ethnic militias – tacitly in Mali’s case, openly in Burkina Faso’s – who have fast established a reputation both for brutality and for carrying out massacres against communities perceived, mostly without basis, as supporting the jihadists.
Western officials hope that, should it come to it, Burkina Faso’s neighbours will avoid making similar mistakes. Others worry they may have no choice.
The Gulf of Guinea states are supposedly stronger than the Sahel, one of the world’s poorest regions.
Ghana and Ivory Coast are West Africa’s second and third richest states respectively, eclipsed only by Nigeria, the continent’s biggest economy. Unlike the Sahel, they are also seen as comparatively strong, functioning states.
Yet there are also too many similarities for comfort. The northern regions of both Ghana and Ivory Coast are not just more Muslim but far poorer than the remainder of either country.
The jihadists exploited similarly marginalised communities in Sahelian states, using local grievances as a highly effective recruiting tool. There are religious differences to exploit too, both within Islam along the divide between Sunnis and Sufis, and outside it, between Muslims and Christians.
A series of massacres in Burkina Faso that has seen gunmen burst into church Sunday services and massacre people at prayer has already sparked anger and terror among Christians in northern Ghana.
Some churches have already banned backpacks and placed scanning machines outside their entrances, fearing suicide bombs.
If religious and ethnic tensions are mounting in the Gulf of Guinea’s stronger states, the problem is even more acute in Togo and Benin, much poorer, more dysfunctional and more similar to the Sahelian states.
Last year, two French tourists were kidnapped in the Pendjari national park in northern Benin by Islamic State militants and two French soldiers were killed in their eventual rescue.
The militants may have been helped, a regional security source said, by locals with land grievances caused by their displacement to create the park, a key refuge for some of the world’s last substantial populations of forest elephant.
The jihadists are thought to have slipped into Benin along one of the many smuggler and bandit routes that dot Burkina Faso’s borders with its southern neighbours, he said.
“You have, in the northern parts of all these [Gulf of Guinea] countries all the perfect elements, from criminality to marginalisation and local grievances, for jihadists to exploit,” he said.