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FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron announced this week that France was ending its Barkhane anti-jihadist mission in Africa after more than a decade, saying a new strategy would be worked out with African partners.

The move was the “consequence of what we have experienced” in recent months, and a new strategy would be worked out within the next half-year, he said in a keynote speech on military policy.

“Our engagements with our partners in Africa will be focused on a logic of co-operation and relying on their arms,” Macron told senior armed forces members and diplomats aboard a French helicopter carrier in Touloun.

French forces have faced hostility from some who see them as an ineffective occupying force of a former colonial power.

Macron pulled troops out of Mali this year as relations soured with the country’s military rulers. Around 3 000 French soldiers remain in Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger.

There are no immediate plans for a reduction in numbers. | AFP

| AFP PRESIDENT Emmanuel Macron visited the French Navy base at Toulon, in southern France where the amphibious helicopter carrier Dixmude is docked. He presented the major strategic challenges that France must face, in a global geopolitical grammar disrupted by the war in Ukraine.