NY TIMES
In July, the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin released a video from his new base in Belarus, welcoming his fighters to their country of exile after the Wagner group’s ill-fated mutiny. He also told them to prepare — for “a new journey to Africa.”
It was the first public signal that Wagner’s expansive Africa operations would carry on after Mr. Prigozhin’s banishment. Days later, after a coup in Niger ousted the democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, Mr. Prigozhin wasted no time in offering his services to the new junta leader, though it is unclear what control he still has over the group after his failed mutiny attempt in Russia in June. One putschist traveled next door to Mali to meet with Wagner personnel in Bamako, where the mercenary group provides security for that junta’s government.
The events fueled immediate speculation that Moscow had engineered the coup, a notion encouraged by videos showing Nigeriens waving Russian flags in the capital, Niamey. The United States insists there’s “no indication” either Mr. Prigozhin or President Vladimir Putin of Russia was involved, while one Russian state media figure portrayed the events as an example of a Russian-led “anti-colonial revolution,” a BBC journalist reported.
Either way, the ouster of Mr. Bazoum by Niger’s military has presented an important opportunity to Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Putin. It has allowed them to move on from the mutual embarrassment of the failed mutiny in June and to show that the Wagner force is growing stronger in Africa at the same time that the West’s military presence is fading. As terrorist groups gather strength in the neighborhood, that reversal could devolve into a major security threat.
Over the past decade, the Sahel, a vast semiarid region of western and north-central Africa, has become a tangle of transnational terrorist groups, including the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, Boko Haram and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin. France’s eight-year military campaign intended to stabilize the region, named Operation Barkhane, ended in failure in the fall of 2022, leaving a security vacuum that was quickly filled by jihadists and Wagner mercenaries.
Contrary to the postcoup narrative, Niger — while a democracy — was hardly an oasis of stability: The Global Terrorism Index has documented a steady increase in terrorism-related deaths in the country in recent years. But the nation’s successive elected governments were at least willing to cooperate with Washington, allowing the U.S. military to conduct regional counterterrorism activities. The United States has two military bases in Niger with roughly 1,100 troops between them, cooperated with government officials and operated a security cooperation assistance program for Nigerien troops fighting Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants in the Sahel.
Now military exercises between America and Niger have been suspended. Washington has stopped short of calling the crisis a coup — a move that would require the United States to halt security and economic assistance. American diplomats and West African officials are trying to negotiate a return to power for Mr. Bazoum. If that effort fails, and Washington loses access to the drone base it runs there and other intelligence and surveillance activities in the area, its grasp of what insurgent groups are up to in the Sahel will be severely curtailed.
Wagner will be ready. Its forces are already deployed in Mali and Libya, both of which border Niger, as well as in the Central African Republic and Sudan. Since first sending troops to Africa in 2017, the group has embedded itself in these fragile states and siphoned valuable resources, a quid pro quo that offers military muscle in exchange for mining contracts that allow Wagner subsidiaries to extract gold, diamonds and other commodities that pad Russia’s coffers. Their operations have frequently resulted in the deaths of civilians, with credible accusations of sexual violence, torture and extrajudicial killings. The arrangements boil down to simple supply and demand: African putschists need the security that Wagner can provide, and the Kremlin needs the funding stream to soften the blow from biting Western sanctions.
That system did not collapse after Mr. Prigozhin’s failed coup. Within days of Wagner’s aborted advance on Moscow, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that Wagner’s African footprint would remain. Late last month, Mr. Prigozhin reportedly surfaced from exile in St. Petersburg, where he posed for photographs with African leaders who were in town for a summit. Mr. Putin also attended.
But while Wagner is employed by several states to fight and weaken jihadist groups in the Sahel, its growing presence — and reputation for brutality — are having the opposite effect. Terrorist organizations have used rising resentment of Wagner’s scorched-earth tactics to recruit new members, offering them both protection and an opportunity for revenge. As the militant threat gathers force, there is growing and legitimate concern about the groups’ expansion into coastal West Africa, potentially destabilizing countries like Togo, Benin, Ghana and the Ivory Coast.
That deteriorating security situation presented serious risks to the United States and its Western allies before Niger’s coup. Now things look worse. If the coup ends up allowing a corridor to open between the two branches of the Islamic State in the region, for instance, the group could bring in members from Nigeria. The nightmare scenario for America would be getting shut out of Niger, Wagner moving in and jihadist groups becoming so powerful that they transform the Sahel into a version of Afghanistan in the pre-9/11 era, one that eventually gathers the organizational strength to launch international attacks.
Niger’s coup, the latest addition to the “corridor of coups” shaping up across north-central Africa, is a dramatic setback for the millions of Nigeriens who voted for Mr. Bazoum in the 2021 elections and for Western countries seeking to keep regional terrorist networks in check. It’s not clear, as a bloc of West African states threaten military intervention and internal resistance to the coup grows, what happens next. But if the Sahel devolves into a patchwork of jihadist statelets, the West will have few, if any, options to contain the growing menace. For Wagner and Russia, it would mean more money in the bank — and more influence in the region.
