Militant Advances in Mali Threaten West Africa, Nigeria Warns

(Bloomberg) -- The capture of a key Malian town by rebel forces last month poses a regional threat that requires foreign intervention to prevent the insurgency from spreading, Nigeria’s defense minister said.

A series of coordinated attacks by militants in late April left Mali’s defense minister dead and forced Malian and Russian mercenary forces to withdraw from the northeastern stronghold of Kidal. The international community must come together to deal with the insurgents before they wreak havoc, Christopher Musa said in an interview.  

The tri-border region of Nigeria, Benin and Niger on the southern edge of the already volatile Sahel region is becoming a new stronghold for jihadists, as militants turn forests and pastoral networks in West Africa into bases for recruitment and international attacks. The deteriorating situation in Mali may trigger a wider regional crisis, the minister said. 

The international community, through the United Nations, “must come together to fight this devil,” Musa said in an interview in his office in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, on Wednesday. “If they allow them to get any foothold in Mali, completely, they are not stopping there.”

He cited the joint campaign against Islamic State in Syria — a US-led multinational effort initiated a decade ago to dismantle IS’s caliphate — as a way to root out terrorists in West Africa.

The collapse of states across the region has been the main driver of arms proliferation, with coastal states including Ghana and Togo becoming increasingly vulnerable, the minister said. He cited the fall of former Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi in 2011 as a turning point that released vast stockpiles of weapons into circulation, a problem compounded by ongoing instability in Sudan.

The combined crises have created an open corridor across the Sahel, allowing small arms, light weapons and ammunition to flow largely unchecked, facilitated by weak border controls and ease of movement across the region.

Kidal in Mali carries outsized symbolic weight.

The Malian army was driven out of the town in 2012 by Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-linked militants, and a bid to retake it in 2014 left scores of people dead on both sides. When government forces and Russian mercenaries finally recaptured the town in 2023, the junta presented it as vindication that it had made the right choice in ending civilian rule two years earlier. 

Meanwhile in Nigeria, terror attacks, kidnappings, banditry and clashes between herders and farmers have killed almost 8,000 people since President Bola Tinubu came to office in 2023, according to Lagos-based SBM Intelligence.

The number of suicide bombings in Nigeria by March already matched the annual average over the past six years, according to data on the website of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a conflict-monitoring group.

The attacks have rocked Nigeria’s security establishment, with militants targeting and killing senior Nigerian military officers. Among them was Brigadier-General Oseni Omoh Braimah, who died in April when Islamist fighters attacked a base in northeastern Borno state, the epicenter of a 15-year insurgency.

The country of about 230 million people is roughly split between Muslims and Christians, and has been long-plagued by ethnic violence driven by access to resources such as land and water, and terrorism by Boko Haram and Islamic State that kills Muslims and Christians almost in equal proportion.

To meet its defense goals, Nigeria is stepping up efforts to build domestic arms-manufacturing capacity. The minister said disruptions linked to global conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, as well as the ongoing war in Iran have made it harder to source weapons even when funding is available.

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