Soumaïla doesn't realize it, she knows it: the jihadists can kill you from grief. He asks her to accompany him to the door of his house, a mud hut surrounded by a cane palisade, and points to a mound of disturbed earth with half a pumpkin protruding from it. It is the grave of his father. “His body stopped working due to tension and sadness. He didn't even have the strength to lift his arms. He felt bad and spent the whole day stretched out because every day news came that a family member or friend had been killed. He couldn't stand it. He died a month after we got here.”
Soumaïla, 18, remembers his father's goodbye sitting with his mother, Thiombianon Labi, and his eight siblings, on the outskirts of Tanguieta, a city in northern Benin 60 kilometers from the Burkina Faso border. Her mother interrupts her son to complete the story of her escape. “It happened two years ago. Some armed men came to town and told us that we had to leave. They came on motorcycles and went house to house. Those who refused or protested were killed. They killed many.” Since then, mother and son share the same fear. “We pray that the jihadists do not come here. We know that they are close, increasingly, and we just want to live in peace.”
Your fear is not exaggerated. France's loss of influence in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, taken advantage of by Russia, which has allied itself with the Sahelian military regimes, has coincided with an unsustainable violent spiral in the region. In 2023, Islamist groups murdered 11,643 people in the Sahel, three times more than in 2020, when the first military coup took place in Mali, justified by the coup plotters by the inability of the previous government and its French allies to respond to the threat. terrorist.
Far from containing the chaos, the jihadist shadow, with groups linked to the Islamic State or al Qaeda, is now expanding southwards over Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo, but especially towards Benin. From January to November of last year, this country recorded more violent incidents – attacks by armed groups on civilians or clashes with the military – than all its coastal neighbors combined. While the Ivorian nation strengthened its security in the north in the months before the African Cup of football and reduced incidents to 26 cases, its neighbors Togo and Ghana each suffered forty clashes with jihadist groups on their border with Burkina Faso.
Benin far exceeds these figures and multiplies them by ten. According to a report by Granit, an analysis group linked to the United Nations that studies violence in the region, northern Beninese suffered 260 violent incidents, in addition to 137 episodes of social unrest such as demonstrations or clashes with political or religious authorities.
The geographical location of Benin, whose northern roads are a transit point for nomads, merchants, bandits and traffickers from Nigeria to Niger or Burkina Faso, reinforces its condition as the most fragile piece in the face of the fundamentalist advance. Pendjari National Park, a few years ago the main elephant sanctuary in West Africa, is today one of the main refuges for extremist gangs in the area.
The result is a wave of fear like that of Soumaïla and Labi. Although the Benin government denies the problem and does not want to talk about a refugee emergency, northern Benin currently hosts 5,900 Burkinabe refugees fleeing jihadist attacks on the other side of the border, in addition to 8,700 internally displaced people due to violence. direct or incited jihadist: the report of the Dutch Clingendael foundation “Laws of attraction. "The north of Benin and the risk of a violent overflow of extremists" warns that armed groups are fueling the historic inter-community conflicts between ranchers and farmers of opposing ethnic groups to penetrate the area, generate violence and create a breeding ground favorable to their interests.
In the streets of the city of Tanguieta the aroma of the front line of the battle against jihadist cancer is palpable. Military troops armed to the teeth patrol along its sandy avenues of cracked asphalt and orange dust. Although moderate Islam is mostly practiced in the region, in recent years we have begun to see more women in burqas or men with long beards and pants that leave their ankles uncovered to facilitate ritual ablutions before prayer.
Dahani Idrissa, spokesperson for Burkinabe refugees in the city, feels chills because she has experienced it before. “Things are starting to happen in Benin… A month ago, armed men tried to enter through the border and the military managed to throw them out. “They are advancing more and more.”
Idrissa lives alone in Tanguieta because the jihadists made a mess in his town. They killed 87 neighbors, including his nine brothers. He was saved because he was cultivating the garden and, upon hearing the shots and seeing the smoke from the first huts burning, he was able to hide in the forest.
As she has experienced it herself, Idrissa knows that before the violence and murders begin, signs of collapse occur. “First they went after the schools. They didn't want to see any teachers and they closed more than 400 schools, then they started killing. They burned the schools and the teachers who did not flee were killed or kidnapped. “They hate French education and establish Koranic schools.”
That silent penetration into local minds has already begun. Missionaries arriving from the Sahel tour the mosques of northern Beninese and preach a radical vision of Islam, advocating a return to the glorious times of the Muslim empires in the area and pointing to the West and its sinful customs as the enemy to defeat. New mosques financed with money from the Gulf, as well as Islamic NGOs, only for Muslims, have appeared in the region in recent years and their anti-Western discourse is gradually penetrating an impoverished population, where unemployment is the norm and climate change has hardened even more so the lives of ranchers and farmers.
To combat this poisoning of mentalities, some local and international NGOs have initiated projects to provide education to refugees or displaced by jihadist violence. Kampoua Alidou, 10 years old, started going to school in September, after three years without setting foot in a classroom. In his Burkinabe village of Tambaliga, the bearded men ordered the school to close, and now on Beninese soil he has just resumed his studies. She is delighted. “I like learning to read and write, French, mathematics... I like everything,” she says.
Although Kampoua is a happy and smiling girl, the memory of the massacres that the jihadists perpetrated in her village, where they murdered several young people to force the exodus of all the neighbors, are reflected in her dreams for the future. When she is asked what she would like to be if she grew up, she doesn't hesitate. “I would like to be a soldier,” she answers, “to fight the jihadists and take revenge for what they did.”
