THE GUARDIAN
“We fled here to Niamey with nothing. We don’t even know how to feed ourselves,” said Amadou as he sat outside a tiny concrete home on the fringe of Niger’s capital, recounting an attack on his village by government forces late last year.
Another family member opened the door, revealing that it was empty except for a few foam bedrolls and a couple of cooking pots and household items.
According to Amadou, several members of his family, and others from their village near the border with Mali and Burkina Faso, the Nigerien military executed several village elders and local leaders during the attack. They said it wasn’t the first time that people from their village had been killed or injured by government troops. Amadou and several others provided their full names and that of their village, but the Guardian has withheld them due to fears of potential retribution.
Amadou and the others are all members of the Fulani ethnic group – predominantly semi-nomadic Muslim cattle herders also known as the Peuhl who have long expressed discontent with their governments across the Sahel over neglect of their communities and their poor political representation.
As a stigmatised minority with limited economic prospects, they have been heavily recruited by the jihadist groups who have killed thousands in the region in recent years, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle of government abuse.
“Our area is under jihadist domination, so the government believes that we are on the jihadists’ side,” Amadou said.
A neighbour from his village said she had fled with nothing but the clothes she was wearing. “I don’t even know if my sister is alive or dead,” she said. “They have been killing us, innocent people, and also our imams and leaders to break the pillars of our community.”
Amadou’s account raises awkward questions for the US, which has developed a close relationship with the Nigerien military over the past two decades.
In recent years, US and other western officials have highlighted the dangers posed by jihadists and Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group in west Africa.
“In the Sahel right now, we have multiple violent extremist organisations that threaten the safety and security and prosperity of that region,” said Rear Admiral Milton “Jamie” Sands III, chief of US special operations command Africa (SocaAfricaSOCAFRICA), on a recent conference call with the Guardian and reporters from other media outlets. “This is compounded, I think, to an extent by Wagner … Wagner makes countries less stable and less secure.”
What Sands and others often fail to mention is that while regional insecurity has been increasing for 10 years, Wagner has only been locally active since about December 2021 while the United States has been heavily involved for two decades.
In 2002, the US began providing Niger with counter-terrorism assistance and over the last decade has provided more than $500m in security assistance, from armoured vehicles to surveillance aircraft, making it the largest recipient of state department military aid in west Africa and the second highest in sub-Saharan Africa.
Over the last decade, the number of US personnel deployed to Niger has jumped from 100 to 1001 – an increase of 900%. US troops have trained, advised and assisted Nigerien troops and even fought alongside their local partners. In 2017, for instance, four American soldiers were killed in an ambush by Islamic State fighters near the village of Tongo Tongo. The US has also built a number of military or CIA outposts, including several bases to launch armed drones.
The US has been joined in Niger by a host of foreign partners, among them Canadian commandos, and trainers from African Union and European Union member states, including military personnel from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy and former coloniser, France. And this engagement extends across the region. In February, for example, SOCAFRICA conducted its annual Flintlock counter-terrorism exercise which saw operational planning carried out at the British high commission in Accra, Ghana and hundreds of African military personnel from across the region – including Niger – paired up with Nato “partners” for tactical training.
This counter-terrorism assistance has, however, failed to stem sky-rocketing jihadist violence. Even the Pentagon admitted this in its little-noticed analyses. “With 2,737 violent events, the western Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali, and western Niger) experienced the largest escalation in violent events linked to militant Islamists over the past year of any region in Africa, a 36% increase,” reads a recent report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a US defense department research institution. “Fatalities in the Sahel involving militant Islamist groups rose even more rapidly, 63%, resulting in 7,899 fatalities.” The February report notes that Niger specifically “saw a 43% increase in violent events in the past year.” All told, the Africa Center found attacks linked to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel have jumped 3,500% since 2016.
Elizabeth Shackelford, a former US state department foreign service officer who served in several posts in Africa and is now a senior foreign policy fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said these metrics mean that hard questions must be asked. “At a minimum, more US security assistance isn’t leading to more security, and all signs suggest it plays a role in making matters worse,” she said. “While correlation isn’t necessarily causation, any rational observer would ask the question: ‘What role is US security assistance really playing here?’ Niger is supposed to be the success story for US counter-terrorism partnership in the region. If these are the wins, what do the losses look like?”
The international mentorship has also failed to curb a long history of abusive behaviour by the Nigerien armed forces. Sands, the SOCAFRICA commander, had only good things to say about Niger’s military. “I’m encouraged by what I see from Nigerien special operations and the government of Niger,” he said. “They have an effective force. They continue to build that force, to train that force, and they’re exceptional partners.”
But the US state department is far less sanguine. “There were numerous reports of arbitrary or unlawful executions by authorities or their agents,” reads their most recent assessment of human rights in Niger. “For example, the armed forces were accused of summarily executing persons suspected of fighting with terrorist groups in the Diffa and Tillaberi regions.”
These cycles of jihadist and state violence have fed a humanitarian catastrophe exacerbated by climate crises like floods and droughts. In 2023, the United Nations estimates that 4.3 million Nigeriens, roughly 17% of the population, will require humanitarian assistance. Children, about 2 million of those in need, are likely to suffer most. Last year, close to 580,000 children suffered from wasting. According to Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, more than 57,000 youths in Niger have been traumatised by armed violence and are in need of mental health services.
Sands continues to tout the professionalism of Niger’s armed forces and claims that they’ve made strides in increasing stability across the Sahel.
“We have good interoperability with Nigerien [special operations forces], and we are also seeing Niger really evolve into a security exporter in the region,” he said. The Pentagon’s own statistics show that regional security has, however, been in short supply. “The Sahel now accounts for 40% of all violent activity by militant Islamist groups in Africa, more than any other region in Africa,” reads the February report by the Africa Center. “Militant Islamist violence in the Sahel is also responsible for the displacement of more than 2.6 million people.”
For those unwittingly caught up in the violence, like Amadou and his family, the future is bleak.
“The jihadists are just bandits. They steal. They’re criminals,” he said. “But we’re trapped between them and the government. Every time the government troops come, they either injure or kill people.”
