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The last French convoy from Operation Barkhane, prepares to leave Gossi, Mali.
The UN’s dangerous withdrawal from Mali
The UN this week laid out a timeline for withdrawing peacekeeping troops from the West African state of Mali – a mission that UN chief António Guterres has called “unprecedented” because of the vast logistical and security challenges.
Roughly 13,000 UN peacekeepers and police – and 1,786 civilian staff – will be out of the country by Dec. 31, with their infrastructure handed over to Mali’s military government. The withdrawal of UN forces, who’ve been in the country for a decade, is a huge development in a state long plagued by ethnic strife, poverty, and Islamic insurgents.
Some quick background. The landlocked Sahelian country has been grappling with relentless violence since a military coup in 2012, which gave an opening to an expansive Islamic insurgency that’s since spilled over into neighboring countries.
Years of instability have given rise to multiple military coups since then, most recently in 2021. Last year, that junta expelled French soldiers deployed there to help quash jihadist violence. And most recently in June, Mali’s junta leaders – who have close ties to Russia’s Wagner Group, whose troops they invited to help keep things “under control” – ordered UN peacekeepers to leave.
The withdrawal is now a massive operation for the UN, which will try to evacuate troops and equipment from a hostile environment overrun by rival armed groups and terror cells. (Consider that the UN recently said that the Islamic State doubled the amount of territory it holds in less than a year.) Making matters worse, neighboring Niger, a transit country, recently underwent its own military coup and can’t be considered a safe passage.What We're Watching: Argentina's abortion bill, Spain's vaccine registry, Burkina Faso's security push
Argentina's abortion debate: Argentina's Senate is set to vote on a landmark abortion bill that would allow elective abortions up to 14 weeks gestation, a major shift in the predominantly Catholic and socially conservative country. The abortion bill already passed the lower house of Congress (131 to 117 votes) because the center-left party of President Alberto Fernández, who backs the bill, holds a majority coalition. It's now waiting to be voted on in Argentina's upper house in what's expected to be a nail-biter, with several politicians remaining mum about how they intend to vote. Abortion is a flashpoint in Argentina, home to Pope Francis who has repudiated the bill, and if the law were to pass, the country would be one of just few Latin American countries to authorize elective abortions outside of cases of rape or if the mother's life is at risk. If there's a tie in the Senate — which some analysts anticipate — it will be up to Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who has flip-flopped on the abortion issue during her long political career, to cast the deciding vote. Abortion rights activists, meanwhile, are fired up, hoping that if the bill passes in Argentina, the cultural effects could reverberate throughout the region.
Spain's vaccine refusal database: Spain plans to register all people who turn down the opportunity to get a coronavirus vaccine when it is offered to them. The information won't be publicly disclosed nor shared with employers, but it will be sent to European Union health officials. The announcement came as a surprise for Brussels, which has yet to explain what it'll do with the data given the EU's robust data privacy laws, or whether it's open to a similar EU-wide database. Vaccination is not mandatory but strongly encouraged by authorities in Spain, which this week surpassed 50,000 COVID-19 deaths and has the world's second highest per capita mortality rate. As vaccines have just started being rolled out across the entire EU, we're watching to see whether other member states will set up their own vaccine refusal registries to not only deter skeptics but also provide more accurate information about how many people actually get inoculated.
Burkina Faso's security push: At his inauguration ceremony on Monday, Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Christian Kabore pledged to make security in the West African country a political priority amid ongoing jihadist violence that's caused more than 850,000 people to flee their homes in recent years. Kabore, who will now serve his second term, said he wants to instill "stability and security" to Burkina Faso, where swaths of the country have been taken over by jihadist groups. But it's not just vigilantes and terrorist groups (linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State) that have wreaked havoc on the country of 21 million people in recent years: a New York Times expose published this past summer revealed that trigger-happy soldiers in Burkina Faso's army kill as many civilians as jihadists do (it doesn't help that the government has passed draconian legislation banning journalists from reporting on anything that could "demoralize" the armed forces). Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the Sahel region, has been plagued by political corruption and human rights violations from the top down – and lacks the political and institutional strength to fend off a violent insurgency that spilled over from neighboring Mali in recent years, tormenting the entire Sahel.
Nigeria's struggles
The reports are horrifying. Bullets flying overhead as school-age kids scream out in fear. Chaos. Shrapnel. Hundreds go missing.
This was the scene last week when militants stormed a high-school in Katsina, northern Nigeria, to abduct hundreds of students, 400 of whom remain missing. It's a horror story reminiscent of the 2014 kidnapping of schoolgirls that prompted the viral #BringBackOurGirls campaign championed by former US first lady Michelle Obama.
The attack, which has now been claimed by the militant group Boko Haram, comes just weeks after the brutal slaying of Nigerian farmers in Borno state by militants on motorcycles. (At least thirty of the victims were beheaded.)
Nigerians have grown increasingly furious at the government for not doing more to keep them safe. But what are the conditions that have allowed groups like Boko Haram and Islamic State cells to gain a foothold in Africa's most populous country and largest economy?
A new era. When Nigeria held presidential elections in 2015, it was the first time the country of over 200 million people had experienced a peaceful transition of power. Muhammadu Buhari — a former general who led a military junta that ruled Nigeria in the early 1980s — was elected as a civilian, vowing to root out government corruption and extrajudicial killings, and prioritize Nigeria's democratic awakening.
Buhari also pledged to combat Boko Haram, which was founded in 2002 aiming to establish Nigeria as an Islamic state, and had successfully seized swaths of territory under former president Goodluck Jonathan.
But Buhari's promises proved to be mostly empty. For instance, the government's brutal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (long accused of torture and extrajudicial killings) that Buhari had pledged to overhaul, continued to terrorize Nigerians, giving rise to mass protests this past fall.
Meanwhile, poverty has surged while corruption and grifting from those at the top have continued unabated. Unemployment among young Nigerians now hovers around 30 percent, a telling sign in a country where more than half of the population — over 100 million people — is under the age of 30.
Economic woes. After promising to deliver annual economic growth of 10 percent, Buhari has also squandered Nigeria's economic opportunities over the past five years. In failing to diversify the country's economy, his government has left Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer, vulnerable to the shocks of global oil markets.
Indeed, armed groups' attacks on oil facilities have further undermined the petroleum-rich nation's oil output. And disruptions to oil and gas supply chains have only gotten worse in the COVID era.
Nigeria's internal strife is further complicated by deep-rooted divisions along ethnic and religious lines. Around half the country's population identifies as Christian, while the other 50 percent, mostly in the country's northern provinces, identify as Muslims. While groups like Boko Haram subscribe to a warped interpretation of Islam that justifies murder of Christians, in practice, both Christians and Muslims have been targeted in recent years.
To be sure, religious and ethnic divisions don't explain everything about Nigeria's internal struggles. Clashes between herders and farming communities, which have erupted across Nigeria's Middle Belt in recent years, are mostly between Muslim ethnic groups, leading to hundreds of deaths and the displacement of thousands. Still, a 2019 survey found that while 73 percent of Nigerian Muslims approve of President Buhari, who is Muslim, only 26 percent of the country's Christians feel the same way.
Spillover effects: While Boko Haram's activities have mostly been concentrated in northeastern Nigeria, the group has at times expanded its reach throughout the central states, targeting hubs like Abuja, the capital.
Meanwhile, because of porous state borders within sub-Saharan Africa, insurgent violence in Nigeria has spilled over into neighboring countries too, stoking up local tensions in places like Chad, Cameroon, and Niger that lack the institutional strength to counter violent insurgencies.
No end in sight. While the Nigerian military — with assistance from neighboring countries — had some success in 2015 in pushing out Boko Haram from areas in the country's northeast, the problem persists: the militant group still retains control over some territory that it uses as a launching pad for waging deadly attacks that Buhari's government appears unable to control.