Three Fronts, One Crisis: Niger, Libya & CAR

I mean, look, we, it's funny because literally last week we saw all the news and the breaking related to Niger, obviously the mutiny that happened, the internal stability in the Sahel and how that can have broader implications.

And obviously anytime something like this happens, and the Sahel or Africa as a whole, Cassius, you are go-to expert to really break down what happened.

I mean, broadly speaking for our audience, over a week ago, there was a failed mutiny within the Niger military that probably was the most severe challenge to the new junta since they assumed power in 2023.

Before I go into details, Casas, I think you would know a lot better.

I mean, for our listeners who maybe not been tracking this, what are the key things that happened in this mutiny and how were the Niger government able to come on top?

So to make it a little easier and put some context on that, you basically have the special forces, which are mostly deployed in the provinces in Niger, and then you have the regular army.

And then you have the presidential guard, which is mostly doing its work, which is protecting the power in place.

And these guys had the most of attention from the power for lots of reasons.

But if you pay attention to what's going on in Africa, mostly you have the leader, which is giving a lot of equipment, a lot of attention and money, et cetera, to the presidential guard for the obvious reason, which is...

They don't want to be thrown away by their own guys.

As a reminder, the current leader of Niger, which is Tiani, is himself a former presidential guard soldier.

So this is kind of the context in which Niger evolved.

And of course, you have all the poverty problems, all the terrorism issues and different other neighboring countries problems with Chad, with Libya, etc.

We will have time to go more in that topic.

On 29th August, in the middle of the night, like very early, like 1 a.m. or something, a lot of reports started to come across internet, a lot of my contacts to try to reach me.

And there were a lot of shootings in the capital, in Niamey.

And the situation was kind of confusing.

So lots of people thought like, oh, okay, this is just shooting again in Niamey because maybe there will be another terrorist attack in the capital.

As a reminder, there was already like three attacks.

actually two terrorist attacks in the capital, one of them which led to have Al-Qaeda on the fucking airport, which released a kind of spectacular video inside the airport.

So people mostly thought it was another terrorist attack.

And since it took a lot of times and there was a lot of confusion and very little news because, you know, there's two effects in Nigeria.

There's a little internet penetration, but also you have the local powers that control the medias and try to avoid letting any news going on on internet and spreading around.

So...

So Kastas, if I might jump in, I guess one of the questions that I would have with the kind of the following questions would be when we're talking about the actual mutiny and everything that occurred and kind of the tensions that you saw from the rumors and the shootings, is this a situation where the confusion happened? Because as you alluded to, there was a lot of terrorist attacks in the Capitol.