Sahel: gold, resources and threats

Introduction by Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, president centre4s.org

In the Sahel, increasingly long-lasting violent terrorism as well as chronical military coups d’état are distracting attention from a situation that undoubtedly reinforce both of them. That is Gold formal and informal productions and sales. It must no longer be excluded that Sahel Islamists have approaches closer to their brothers’ in Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere than thought. Self-financing through the sale of a lucrative local product is a source of independence and influence: opium for Taliban, maritime piracy for Al Shabab and… gold sales for the Sahel groups.

The below paper of Centre4s consultant deserves attention and follow up.

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Sahel: uncontrolled threats takes hold

Immensely vast and still relatively lightly populated, the Sahel continues to be professed as a well-known region. However, for more than a decade, this region has never ceased to surprise by multiple mutations and various brutalities that have started, developed and are spreading there. The current decade atrocities can be boosted only by those that are currently exploding and spreading in Sudan since April 15, 2023. After Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, the latest to join that scene of change, will it further aggravate the situation leading, by imitation effect, to another or more states?

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Sahel: the war in Sudan

Since 2012, the central Sahel region has been continuously subjected to multiple intimately linked political, security and humanitarian crises. Economic catastrophes were bound to follow and with them, famines and environmental degradation. In that already harsh context, the civil war in Sudan and its multiple consequences could only be harmful to the region. Revitalized at the level of its member states and supported by its external partners, the G 5 Sahel, as well as the institutions linked to it, may prove to be more useful than we think.

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Sahel: growing uncertainties and insecurity

‘’Today what happens everywhere can be seen and heard everywhere’’.

More widespread, more violent and now openly assumed as at its beginnings in 2012, terrorism in the Sahel continues unabated across the region. Inexorably transformed into an increasingly ethnic war, it is now anchored beyond the center of the Sahel, its earliest base. It is expanding and now enjoys easier access to the shores of the Red Sea and therefore safer supplies of military equipment and of its gold exports.

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Sahel: Sudan a new pervasive insecurity

Here we are!  To the international community, the Sahel is now providing large dividends resulting from a long lasting political indifference and a military neglect or passivity. For over a decade, most terrorism financing in the Sahel has been generated from or has transited through western and north west Sudan. That was carried out in a total silence if not irresponsibility or even complicity. Furthermore, most traffic and trafficking in migrants, combatants as well as in arms, were prosperous in Sudan western borders especially those with chaotic Libya and insecure Central Africa.

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