U.S. TO SEND ENVOY AS SAHEL JIHADIST CRISIS GROWS

The United States is to appoint a special envoy for the Sahel crisis as the Trump administration responds to growing pressure to take the West Africa jihadist threat more seriously.

Tibor Nagy, the head of the State Department’s Africa Section, acknowledged that a rapidly spreading and increasingly bloody Islamist insurgency in the vast area of scrubland to the south of the Sahara was forcing Washington to step up its diplomatic engagement with the region.

“This is one area where the situation is getting much worse by the day,” he told the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “There are certain situations that are so complicated and require so much co-ordination that a special envoy makes sense.”