Liman Nadaw, consultant, centre4s.org
After Mali in September 2021, Burkina Faso in October 2022, Niger in March 2023, the Russian paramilitary company, Wagner, landed in Chad this April 2024. Of the five member countries of the G5 Sahel, only Mauritania has not yet succumbed to the offer of security services wrapped in the name of the famous German musician. In the first three countries, members of the Alliance of Sahel States, Wagner has supplanted the French military. In Mali, precisely, Russians have also taken the place of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali (MINUSMA), which has left at the end of 2023 at Bamako request. In Chad, the Russian firm coexists with French and American military bases. That Wagner take over – increasingly renamed Africa Corps – of four of the G5 Sahel countries, announces the beginning of a “new geopolitical configuration”.
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