Dakar to Riyadh: Links for 2/14/2025
News and analysis from the Sahel, North Africa, the Horn, and the Middle East
Last week’s links can be found here.
General
Zainab Usman at Carnegie: “The Six Areas in Trump’s Executive Orders that Countries in Africa and the Global South Should Pay Attention to.”
Abel Escribà-Folch, Christopher Faulkner, and Marius Mehrl in the Journal of Global Security Studies: “Foreign Legionnaires and Military Mutinies.”
Sahel and West Africa
Katarina Hoije and Jorgelina Do Rosario for Bloomberg: “Senegal’s Auditor Confirms Debt Higher Than Previously Reported.”
Jeune Afrique: “After the Mines, the Telecoms Are in the Sights of the Malian Authorities.”
Presumed jihadists attacked a civilian convoy being escorted by the Malian Armed Forces and the Wagner Group in northern Mali. Soldiers are on the hunt for the suspected perpetrator.
Héni Nsaibia at ACLED:
So far this year, the number of kidnappings of foreign nationals orchestrated by [the Islamic State Sahel Province, ISSP] is unprecedented. Previously, the group carried out such operations very sporadically. At present, this change seems to be driven by the group’s need for resources, given that foreigners command higher ransom fees than local abductees. As ISSP has also gained territory and influence in Mali’s Menaka region and surrounding areas, it is believed that the group also gained better logistical capabilities to hold hostages.
Ed Butler in the BBC: “Why Some Ghanaians Are Fighting in Insurgency-Hit Burkina Faso.” An excerpt:
The three, all in their late thirties or early forties, said they had fought in Burkina Faso multiple times since 2018. They crossed the porous 550km-long (340-mile) border between the two countries, without being detected by the security forces.
They denied being primarily motivated by religion or being trained by the jihadists, saying they went to fight to defend civilian communities with whom they had strong family and ethnic ties.
"My elder brother, his wife and children were all killed by the [Burkinabe] army. It pains me a lot. The military came to their community in the forest. They killed all of them, a whole household, including 29 people," one of the men said.
Burkina Faso’s top authorities appear concerned about the management of state institutions, including recruitment practices.
Chinaza Samuel for DW: “Why Is There a Surge in Job Scams in Nigeria?”
Andy Greenberg in Wired: “The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison.”
North Africa
Fadwa Islah for Jeune Afrique on the ongoing project of reforming Morocco’s Family Code.
Ministers from Algeria, Niger, and Nigeria met to discuss their trans-Saharan pipeline project.
Tim Eaton and Lubna Yousef for Chatham House: “How Migrant Smuggling Has Fuelled Conflict in Libya.”
At OrientXXI, Chantal Verdeil reviews a new book on colonialism and Orientalism in Algeria.
Tunisia’s trade deficit is rising amid falling energy and olive oil exports.
Greater Horn of Africa
At Al Jazeera, ‘Abd al-Ra’uf Taha reports on the “reasons for the Sudanese Armed Forces’ advance” in central Sudan.
Khalid Abdelaziz for Reuters: “Sudan to Form New Government after Regaining Khartoum, Say Military Sources.”
Dallia Abdelmoniem was interviewed by Elle Kurancid in the Los Angeles Review of Books on conflict and humanitarian issues in Sudan.
The National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) has suspended the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) from political activities for three months, citing the party’s failure to hold a general assembly within the legally mandated period. The Board warned that if the party does not take corrective measures during the suspension, its registration will be canceled.
Demelash Kassaye, Dawit Afework, and Paul Jackson at the London School of Economics’ Africa blog: “Community Policing in Ethiopia Is a Balancing Act.”
A somewhat sensationalist and credulous but also important article from the Washington Post’s Katharine Houreld describes the Puntland authorities’ fight against the Islamic State in Somalia.
Mashriq
Mary Turfah writes about Lebanon in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Read the whole thing. Here are the closing paragraphs, which moved me:
Since returning from Lebanon, I haven’t stopped thinking about glass. Glass in places glass shouldn’t be—like the flies in Jean Genet’s “Four Hours in Shatila,” an essay written in the immediate aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut. Genet finds bodies scattered across the earth of the refugee camp; as he relates “stepp[ing] over the bodies as one crosses chasms,” he draws the reader’s attention again and again to what, he says, a photograph won’t show you: the “thick white smell of death” and the flies, everywhere, covering faces, wounds, mouths “black with flies.” He attempts to capture a fuller sensorium of witness. It is emptying to look at the bodies directly; he finds a way to attend to the loss, obliquely.
Shards of glass: under olive trees, across carpets, in puddles, stuck to the soles of my sneakers, in the trash, in the sea. Glass missing from places glass should have been, a barrier between inside and out that the war burst open. Sheets of glass on the backs of pickup trucks parked on side streets. Overpriced glass, fairly priced glass, transparent glass, tinted glass, and smoked glass—i’zeiz, glass, its buzzing consonants puncturing their way into conversation.
Inkasar li’zeiz? Did the glass break? The question had nothing to do with glass and everything to do with people. A people who refuse to break, asking: Tell me, what happened to you that I cannot see?
Zaynab Quadri, “Forever War for Profit: The United States, Israel/Palestine, and the Global Corporate Security Economy.” Part of a new collection from the Project on Middle East Political Science, entitled “Debating American Primacy in the Middle East.” An excerpt from Quadri’s piece:
Israel exemplifies the dialectical ambivalence of “domestic” and “transnational” capital flows: as a settler state sustained through the twentieth century by large investments from donors and foreign governments, it absorbed the external capital into a synthesized national economy, only for this domestic capital to transcend the state in the 1970s and 1980s, re-integrating it into the global economy in new form. By the 1990s, corporate interaction with the transnational market for security no longer required as much state mediation through intergovernmental aid or loans; rather, private capital could flow directly between Israeli security companies and other security companies as well as foreign governments. But Palestine— as defined both through the state intended to encompass the West Bank and Gaza, and through the Palestinian nation living in diaspora across Israel/Palestine— exemplifies the devastating human repercussions of corporatized state power.
Isabel Debre for AP: “More Israeli Checkpoints Are Slicing Up the West Bank.”
At L’Orient Le Jour, Jeanine Jalkh writes about Lebanese-Syrian border clashes and the implications for Hezbollah.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş for the European Council on Foreign Relations: “Topple, Tame, Trade: How Turkey Is Rewriting Syria’s Future.”
Human Rights Watch: “Yemen: Houthi Attack on Civilians May be a War Crime.”
Mohammed Sergie at Semafor: “Investors Back Saudi AI Ambitions, Pledging $20B During Tech Conference.”
Erwin van Veen at Clingendael: “Bleak with Some Silver Linings: Scenarios for EU-Iran Relations.”