(Bloomberg) — The capture of a key Malian city 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 militant attacks in late April killed Mali’s defense minister 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 jihadist stronghold as militants turn West Africa’s forests and pastoral networks 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 a foothold in Mali, absolutely, they’re not going to stop there.”
He cited a joint campaign against Islamic State in Syria — a US-led multinational effort launched a decade ago to dismantle the IS caliphate — as a way to root out terrorists in West Africa.
State collapse across the region has been a major 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 Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 as a turning point that unleashed huge stockpiles of weapons, a problem compounded by Sudan’s ongoing instability.
The combined crises have created an open corridor across the Sahel that allows small arms, light weapons and ammunition to flow largely unchecked, facilitated by lax border controls and ease of movement across the region.
Kidal carries excessive symbolic weight in Mali.
The Malian army was driven out of the city in 2012 by Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-linked militants, and efforts to retake it in 2014 left dozens dead on both sides. When government forces and Russian mercenaries finally recaptured the city in 2023, the junta presented it as a vindication that it had made the right choice two years earlier to end civilian rule.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria, terrorist attacks, kidnappings, banditry and clashes between herdsmen and farmers have killed nearly 8,000 people since President Bola Tinubu took office in 2023, according to Lagos-based SBM Intelligence.
By March, the number of suicide bombings in Nigeria had already matched the annual average for the past six years, according to data on the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data website, a conflict monitoring group.
The attacks rocked the Nigerian 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 around 230 million people is roughly divided between Muslims and Christians and has long been plagued by ethnic violence over access to resources such as land and water, and terrorism by Boko Haram and the Islamic State, which kills Muslims and Christians in almost equal proportions.
To meet its defense goals, Nigeria is stepping up efforts to build domestic arms production capacity. The minister said disruptions related to global conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, as well as the ongoing war in Iran, have made it difficult to obtain weapons, even when funds are available.
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