Russia settles a silent war, but with consequences as or more dangerous than that of Ukraine. At the edges of the African sub-Sahara, Russian interests collide with those of the former colonial powers in retreat. Burkina Faso is the last piece of the Sahel that has fallen. The military junta that has ruled the country since the coup in 2022 has given French troops a month to abandon it. The place of the old metropolis has already been taken by an advance party of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group, and troops sent by Moscow will soon arrive, a carbon copy of what happened in Mali in August last year and of what may happen in Guinea Conakry and in Senegal.
The importance of these changes in alliances derives from the concentration of jihadist groups in an area with diffuse borders and where barbarism reigns. Groups related to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have found among the sands of the Sahara the ideal hiding place to reorganize after being expelled from the Afghan mountains, the Syrian war or southern Algeria.
In this enormous lawless area, not only do terrorists enjoy impunity for preparing kidnappings, blackmail or attacks against the population, but also traffickers of all stripes who use the resources generated to finance them.
For the last decade, France has been the main Western bastion against the fundamentalists in the region, but the ineffectiveness of its operations and the precariousness with which its inhabitants survive have generated a growing rejection of the former colonial power. The change of some now pro-Russian governments and the negligence of the United States, which has irresponsibly ceded the central strip of Africa to China and Russia, have also contributed. Added to all this is extreme poverty and famine that the war in Ukraine has caused in many African countries due to the increase in the cost of cereals, the basis of their subsistence.
Desperation, the colonial ghost and indoctrination are the ideal fuel to feed radicalism with an Islamist matrix. A bomb about to explode and that a cornered Putin can detonate at any moment.
