Thread by @neiLmunshi

I was on vacation when a couple pieces on migration and security I wrote on a trip last month to Niger came out and I just wanted to flag them and a bit of other reporting on the Sahel that informed those pieces and has come out since.

I wrote a Big Read about the dangers confronting this part of the world, an increasingly important (and complicated!) front in the global fight against terrorism and extremism. You can read it here: ft.com/content/bffcec…

But here’s a thread of some of the stuff that’s in the piece and some of the stuff I had to leave in my notebook.

First off, this is Niger, a vast, incredibly interesting country that is twice the size of Ukraine (or more than twice the size of France or Texas, whatever metric works - it’s big). It is also by some measures the world’s poorest, scoring last on the UN’s Human Development Index

It sits at the heart of the Sahel, the semi-arid strip that runs the width of Africa and separates the Sahara from the savannah

Look at these borders - seven of em, six of them in crisis of one degree or another, all of them permeable.

We’ll start at the bottom - where armed bandits in northwestern Nigeria and Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa in the northeast move easily into heavily populated parts of Niger. Here’s a piece I wrote on NE Nigeria late last year:
ft.com/content/62928c…

Moving counter-clockwise to the east, where BH wreak havoc in Chad, which has a quasi-military dictatorship that’s shaky enough that France in February bombed a rebel convoy headed to the capital that had no obvious connection to terrorism: reuters.com/article/us-fra…

Moving north you’ve got battle-scarred Libya, where a military strongman’s march on Tripoli threatens a renewed civil war, and the scattering of up to 1m migrants stranded there who’d been trying to make their way to Europe: af.reuters.com/article/topNew…

I’ll come back to those migrants, but I’ll just flag up this piece, with my colleague @Mikepeeljourno, from when I spent some time in Agadez, which was until 2016 the main transitway for West Africans seeking a better life in Europe: ft.com/content/643f62…

This is Agadez, an incredible, ancient, trans-Saharan Town that at times has the feeling of the Mos Eisley Cantina (NB: multiple people offered to sell me dinosaur bones)

Agadez is also where the US is building a $110m drone base, the Air Force’s largest ever solo project. @JoePenney’s reporting on this and the expanded US drone mission focused mostly on Libya, for the NYT and Intercept, has been essential: theintercept.com/2018/02/18/nig…

Back to the borders: to the northwest, Algeria’s in political chaos and still dealing with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which was born there. Here’s a bit on what’s going on in Algeria: ft.com/content/f57782…

And to the west you’ve got the ethnic clashes and jihadi insurgencies of northern and central Mali, which have spilled over into Burkina Faso, leading to the precipitous collapse of parts of a country once viewed as a model of stability.

.@ruthmaclean had a great piece from BF the other day that reveals the scale of the violence in a country coming apart at the seams: bit.ly/2UyxIgj

Then you’ve got Benin - about 200km out of the country’s 5,800km border - which is relatively safe, though even there you’ve got a nature reserve that’s seeing increased militant activity and fears it might turn into a new hideout for militants like BH's Sambisa Forest.

As Niger’s defense minister, Kalla Moutari, put it to me in his office in Niamey, pointing up at a giant map of his country: “Benin is a very small country!” And it is, as Moutari said, something of “a miracle that our country is still standing, given these threats”.

Niamey is sleepy, but Moutari said Nigerien authorities recently broke up a sleeper cell planning attacks on its military, along with those of the US and the French, both of whom for which Niger is an essential strategic ally.

His office is just 10 miles from where French Reaper drones and Mirage fighter jets take off daily on missions principally in neighbouring Mali, as part of Operation Barkhane, France’s 4,500-troop strong campaign in the Sahel.

Here’s one of those drones (which France says mostly do surveillance, though it has signed an agreement with the US to arm them):

Niamey is within a couple of hours of where the violence in Mali and Burkina is most intense right now, and it is full of every international actor you can imagine - from UN agencies to embassies to NGOs to the EU.

They are all worried about the security situation in the region, its proximity to Europe and, for the EU especially, the potential for a renewed migration crisis if some of the poorest countries in the world with the highest birth rates collapse.

There’s more in the piece here: ft.com/content/bffcec…

But I want to loop back to the migrants who have used to use Niger as a passageway to Europe. Now that the EU has clamped down on sea rescues, and Niger, with EU backing, has cracked down on migration, the story of the crisis is the nearly 1m stranded in lawless Libya

Those who make it out (and those still stuck there) almost universally tell tales of torture, rape, abuse and death in formal and informal detention centres.

This is all, migrant advocates say, a direct result of EU policy that has essentially outlawed search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean by organisations like MSF (which is now considering such missions in the Sahara, because of how dangerous that journey has become).

The EU is also training and funding the Libyan coast guard, which has been accused of human rights violations by a UN panel and which brings migrants and refugees it intercepts in the sea to the country’s notorious detention centres, some of which are run by militias and gangs

In Agadez, I heard stories from Sudanese women raped by Libyan militias, Eritreans beaten bloody, Pakistani tradesmen raped for stealing bread, Senegalese economic migrants who tried and failed three times to cross and returned to beatings and extortion in Libya before giving up

.@sallyhayd is doing really great work on what’s happening to migrants in Libya:

https://twitter.com/sallyhayd/status/1121094261368340481

That part of the migration crisis - the other side, of those who have returned, fleeing on foot through the desert or voluntarily on IOM flights - is increasingly shaping the reality on the ground (if not necessarily the policy debates). I hope to write more about them. /fin

Speaking of those migrants. Now this is happening:

https://twitter.com/petertinti/status/1122888413110243328