Because France does not reduce military intervention in the Sahel
Enrico Martial's article
At least for the moment, France will not reduce the strength of the Barkhane operation to counter the Jiadist forces in Mail and the Sahel. This is the announcement of Emmanuel Macron at the conclusion of the two days of work of the G5 Sahel, that is the meeting of the leaders of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, in which he participated in videoconference on February 16.
France is engaging 5,100 men in the operation, which has reached a further 600 following the G5 Sahel which met in Pau on February 13, 2020. That summit was testimony to a growing difficulty in managing a crisis in which had intervened since 2013. In addition to the increase in the number of soldiers, it was decided to concentrate the forces – which were considered too dispersed – in the area straddling three borders, between Mali, Niger and Burkina, in the hope that the absences in the center of Mali they were covered by the UN and those to the north by the Malian forces themselves.
However, precisely during the Pau summit a year ago, the then President Donald Trump brought the news of the American disengagement, very badly received, because it would have weakened much of the information activities, carried out both with drones and on the ground. This was not, however, a novelty, in the context of the overall US withdrawal from various regional theaters, from the Mediterranean to the Middle East.
The European involvement – in progress since 2018 in a more significant way – still seemed marginal compared to the weight that France feels it bears and is largely concentrated in training activities in the numerous international instruments: for the European Union EUTM Mali, EUCAP Mali and Niger, MINUSMA of the United Nations, in some bilateral action, such as MISIN between Italy and Niger. On the ground there are some progress, but slow: in the Takuba task force – which joins the Barkhane operation – in 2020, among other things, a hundred Estonian soldiers, about sixty soldiers from the Czech Republic, 150 Swedes and up to to 200 Italians, as approved by our parliament on July 16, 2020 with the missions decree.
Although a former colonial country, France is supporting this presence not only from a financial point of view (around 1 billion euros per year) but also with 57 soldiers who have fallen since the beginning of the mission. In Mali there was a coup d'etat on August 18, 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on January 13, 2021 announced that the number of displaced people increased from 490,000 in 2019 to 2 million in 2020. political between the internal divisions of identity components, with independence pushes – including the Tuareg – and the spread of jiadism seems impossible to unravel. The military results are significant (numerous of fallen Jiadists, for example) but confront civilian casualties and numerous controversies and accusations.
From the whole of the European Union – for example with the speech of 8 May 2020 by Josep Borrell, High Representative for External Action – it is often recalled that insecurity in the Sahel favors immigration corridors towards the Mediterranean, it causes instability in the southern parts of Morocco, Algeria and especially Libya, which is going through a rather complicated situation on its own.
Faced with the slow pace of Europeanization of EU foreign policy in the Sahel, the French government's announcement of the resumption of the US role on a global level, also in the anti-terrorist fight, finally expressed on the 4th February by President Joe Biden at the State Department .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-la-francia-non-riduce-lintervento-militare-nel-sahel/ on Wed, 17 Feb 2021 08:44:12 +0000.