West Africa: Climate Change, Governance and Security Across a Connected Region

So Ibrahim, welcome to Climate Crisis and Courage.

It is wonderful to have you with us.

Thank you Nazanin for having me.

So Ibrahim, today we are talking about a vast region, including coastal West Africa, of course, but I wanted to start with perhaps one of the most dynamic crises right now, the central Sahel.

You've been researching and writing about this for years at Crisis Group.

Could you perhaps paint a picture for us of where things stand today and how we got here?

The security situation in the Sahel started 14 years ago.

It started as a result of three main dynamics.

The first one is that we have a decade-long instability in northern Mali with recurrent Tuareg rebellions.

The Tuaregs is a community that you find in Niger, in Mali, in southern Algeria, in southern Libya.

And they were unhappy with, particularly in Mali and Niger, actually.

So they were unhappy with the way that the Malian government has been, you know, governing their area.

So they were asking for autonomy of their region.

They have been engaged in this rebellion for decades.

So this is one side of the problem.

The other dynamic is the spillover of civil war in Algeria.

As we know, I mean, Algeria suffered a brutal civil war, which started in the early 90s and led to the nurturing of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

And Algeria was able to, you know, push the insurgents southward toward the Malian border.

And they established their bases in northern Mali in the 2000s.

This is one of the groups that evolved into the current jihadist groups that we have today.

The third dynamic is the escalating impact of the civil war in Libya in the early 2010s, which led to the death of Muammar Gaddafi, and several Tuareg combatants were recruited in Gaddafi's army, and after his defeat, they returned home with their weapons.

And these three dynamics concatenated together in 2012 and led to the big deflagration that we saw in northern Mali with a coalition of jihadist groups on one hand and the separatist group on the other hand who took over control of northern Mali in 2012.

That led to a military intervention in the north.

Now, jihadists were not completely defeated.

They rather relocated in rural areas and remote border zones from where they essentially waged a rural insurgency that allowed them to conquer vast amounts of territory, not only in northern Mali, but also in central Mali, in northern Burkina Faso, in eastern Burkina Faso, in western Niger.