Dakar to Riyadh: Links for 8/1/2025
News and analysis from the Sahel, North Africa, the Horn, and the Middle East
Last week’s links can be found here.
Sahel and West Africa
In Senegal, former President Macky Sall’s brother-in-law appears to be on the run from the authorities.
As jihadist attacks in western Mali draw nearer to Senegal, authorities in Senegal’s eastern Bakel Department have temporarily banned nighttime use of motorbikes.
RFI covers the exhibit “Mali According to Its Photographers.”
The death of the Burkinabè influencer Alino Faso/Alain Traoré in Cote d’Ivoire, which Ivorian authorities reported as a suicide, has evoked protests in Burkina Faso by citizens demanding the rapid return of the body and a full investigation.
Oliver Dunn and Josef Skrdlik in New Lines Magazine: “When a Dutch Drug Kingpin Needed a New Base, Sierra Leone Welcomed Him With Open Arms.”
The death of two students in northern Ghana’s restive Bawku led the government to deploy more soldiers there.
Ben Ezeamalu for Reuters: “Nigerian Nurses Strike for Pay and Staffing as Talks Collapse.”
Usman Abba Zanna for HumAngle: “In Nigeria’s Borno State, The Displaced Trade Shelter for Life.”
Former Chadian Prime Minister Succès Masra faces shifting charges in his ongoing trial.
North Africa
Ahmed Eljechtimi for Reuters: “Morocco's King Calls for Addressing Regional Inequalities.”
Algeria moves closer towards a war footing.
A public transit strike in Tunisia points to a larger power struggle between President Kais Saied and the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT), RFI’s Lilia Blaise reports.
Rayhan Uddin for Middle East Eye:
Libya’s internationally recognised government has begun using Turkish drones to strike people-smuggling networks.
Strikes were carried out on Wednesday in the northwestern coastal cities of Sabratha and Zwara, the Government of National Unity (GNU) announced.
[…]
[Analyst Emadeddin] Badi said that as well as targeting smugglers, Wednesday’s operation also targeted those loyal to Mohamed Bahroun, known as al-Far (the rat), a prominent militia leader and known GNU opponent.
“It also serves as a deterrent message to rivals in the west coast,” he said. “That kind of signalling aligns closely with Ankara’s broader goal in Libya: avoiding another armed confrontation in Tripoli.”
Greater Horn of Africa
Sudan Tribune: “Darfur Governor Accuses Army of Inaction as Besieged El Fasher Faces Collapse.”
Jonas Horner for the European Council on Foreign Relations, on Gulf powers’ involvement in Sudan’s civil war:
The [Sudanese Armed Forces’, SAF’s] retaking of the capital and other areas in the Nile Valley prompted increasingly public and material overtures from Cairo and Riyadh to help consolidate the authority and legitimacy of both the SAF and the Port Sudan government. At the same time, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are also raising questions about how Burhan plans to minimise the future role and power of Islamist groups, which have been integral to the SAF’s military successes. The [Rapid Support Forces’, RSF’s] ejection from Khartoum also appeared to catalyse Emirati outreach to the African Union (AU), presumably aimed at reanimating an African-led peace process to slow SAF’s battlefield ascendancy. At the same time, Saudi Arabia upped its overt engagement with Port Sudan, and with Chad’s transitional president Mahamat Idris “Kaka” Deby, with whom the UAE struck a deal to support the RSF, seemingly seeking to press home the advantage.
Physicians for Human Rights: “‘You Will Never Be Able to Give Birth’: Conflict-Related Sexual and Reproductive Violence in Ethiopia.” See also coverage by an anonymous reporter at The New Humanitarian.
At Geeska, Mahbub Abdillahi interviews Dabindid Yusuf of Journal Gobanimo:
MA: In your essay “There’s a Logic to Somali Politics,” you argue that what appear as contradictions in Somali politics are, in fact, expressions of a deeper structural logic related to Somalia’s place in the global economy—not just individual failings. Can you explain why you prefer to examine Somali politics through a material and structural lens, and what this perspective contributes to your assessment of the current moment?
DY: I’d like to use recent tensions in Mogadishu surrounding President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s ‘consolidation of power’, as it were, and the ensuing backlash from some federal member states (FMS) as a case in point for this question. What I’ve long found troubling in much mainstream commentary is the tendency to reduce complex political processes to the actions, decisions, or moral failures of individual actors. In this view, crises are the result of ‘bad’ leaders making ‘bad’ choices, with federalism being a neutral, inherently rational institutional framework, to which its breakdown becomes the failure of politicians who happen to ‘overreach’, act ‘irrationally’, or fall prey to personal ambition.
This might hold short-term explanatory power for understanding a politician and/or an administration, but it collapses entirely under historical scrutiny. How do we make sense of the fact that Somalia’s political reconstruction since 1991 has followed a strikingly consistent pattern across successive ‘reconciliation’ conferences and administrations, regardless of who is in office? And this is where the structural, materialist critique becomes apparent—in that recurring collapses of elite consensus cease to be anomalies or errors in leadership; they’re symptoms of a broader political economy rooted in a systemic logic.
Mashriq
Yezid Sayigh in Carnegie’s Diwan:
[In Egypt,] the [Abdel-Fattah al-]Sisi regime’s restriction of elite recruitment to the institutional silos of power ministries not only underlines the marginal political status of the private sector, but also reveals the striking absence of a “second stratum,” the necessary social base and intermediary class on which every regime relies to govern and impose its authority. This constitutes the third main factor affecting the power vertical. Since coming to office, Sisi has sidelined “the traditionally state-centric middle class” that depended on employment in the large public sector, as Robert Springborg notes. And in limiting the rehabilitation of the Mubarak-era National Democratic Party, he has also weakened the rural middle classes that acted as the regime’s other conservative social base or second stratum. The lack of civil society autonomy further impedes, if not prevents, the emergence of parallel channels for social mobility into and within the power vertical, let alone for political claim-making and social representation. But nor does the regime offer integration into the power vertical to its new social base, namely the upper middle class and wealthy elites, so far blocking fresh blood from this source.
Jasper Nathaniel at Drop Site: “The Information Warfare Consortium Shaping GHF’s PR Offensive.”
Yara Ibrahim in Carnegie’s Diwan: “Several consulting and equity firms and non-profits were in on the Gaza aid plan, but they never should have been.”
Paloma Dupont de Dinechin for Middle East Eye: “Sweida after the Ceasefire: Executions, a Mass Grave, and the Voices Left Behind.”
Muhammad Yasin Najjar in Al Jazeera: “Syria-Israel Negotiations: Mistakes and Important Lessons.”
Abby Sewell and Qassim Abdul-Zahra for the AP: “Iraq’s Prime Minister Seeks Closer US Ties While Keeping Armed Groups at Bay.” An excerpt:
One of the most complicated issues for [Prime Minister Mohammed Shia] al-Sudani is how to handle the Popular Mobilization Forces, a coalition of mostly Shiite, Iran-backed militias that formed to fight IS. This coalition was formally placed under the control of the Iraqi military in 2016, although in practice it still operates with significant autonomy.
The Iraqi parliament is discussing legislation that would solidify the relationship between the military and the PMF, drawing objections from Washington. The State Department said in a statement last week that the legislation “would institutionalize Iranian influence and armed terrorist groups undermining Iraq’s sovereignty.”
Related, from Al Jazeera:
At least one police officer was killed and 14 fighters detained after a gun battle erupted in Iraq’s capital with members of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), a state-sanctioned paramilitary umbrella that includes groups loyal to Iran.
The violence on Sunday broke out in Baghdad’s Karkh district when PMF fighters stormed a Ministry of Agriculture building during the appointment of a new director, the Interior Ministry said.
Jasim al-Azzawi at Al Jazeera: “Iran’s Plan to Abandon GPS Is about Much More than Technology.”
Gram Slattery and Ryan Patrick Jones at Reuters: “US Hits Iranian Shipping Network with Major New Sanctions.” See Treasury’s statement here.
In Iran, Baluch and Kurdish militant groups have ramped up deadly attacks on security forces in recent days. The assaults have taken place in Kurdish-majority towns near the western border with Iraq, and in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan Province, which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan. The rise in violence comes barely a month after a ceasefire ended a 12-day war with Israel.
Sophian Aubin for France24: “War Against Captagon: Why Is Saudi Arabia Executing Drug Dealers on a Massive Scale?”
Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal for the Project on Middle East Political Science: “GCC-driven Regional Order: Sub-Imperial Cartographies and the Question of Palestine Post-7 October.” The piece is part of a collection entitled “Regional Order Making After October 7.”