The release of hostages - two French, an American and a South Korean - last month in Burkina Faso, as well as the death of six people killed in an attack against a Catholic church in northern Burkina Faso confirm if needed be that the Sahel is plunging into a deeper chaos.
Six years have passed since Operation Serval in northern Mali, neither this, nor Barkhane nor the G5 Sahel have so far managed to defeat or even contain terrorism in the region. On the contrary, hostage taking and the recurrent attacks remind us that terrorist groups are not only well rooted, but that no Sahelian country - and Africa - is today immune or spared from terrorism. Terrorism continues to spread eastwards in Niger -28 Nigerian soldiers were also killed in an ambush this May-, in Burkina Faso and elsewhere, but also further South, in the Gulf of Guinea, underlining thus the limits of counterterrorism strategies. Bearing in mind this chaotic situation, the growing presence of foreign troops in the region with French forces at the forefront, cannot alone explain such material, financial and human investments.
The G5 Sahel irrelevance
The G5 Sahel (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad) group is supposed to eventually take over from Barkhane’s forces in the fight against terrorism. This is the official version. However, beyond the indisputable inability of its military forces to defeat the terrorist groups, the G5 Sahel ignores de facto the north-south and interregional dynamics, weakening in turn the security mechanisms already in place such as the Nouakchott Process - which includes eleven States ranging from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea-, conceived and conceptualised in 2013 by the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union (AU) to address the security crisis in this region as a whole. In doing so, it not only delineates the geostrategic issue of the Sahelo-Saharan region, but also underlines the interdependence of all concerned States, from North to West Africa.
