During his visit last week to northern Mali, Emmanuel Macron, France’s new president, announced that he would attend the next meeting of the G5 Sahel, a grouping of five countries—Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad—focused on mobilizing against extremist militants in the Sahel region. The G5 Sahel was originally created in February 2014, and plans for a multinational military force were announced the following year, at a November 2015 summit meeting in Chad. Since then, however, few details have been made available on the force’s composition and how it will operate. In an email interview, Nicolas Desgrais, a researcher at the Brussels School of International Studies at the University of Kent, explains the security threats in the region and how the force might help to contain them.
WPR: What are current plans for the force in terms of its size and how it will be deployed?
Nicolas Desgrais: Since the announcement of the multinational force, scant information has been made public on its architecture, command structure, mandate and potential missions. Member states have only noted that the force will be composed of 4,000 soldiers, as Mali’s defense minister, Tiena Coulibaly, told journalists at a meeting earlier this month in Abidjan.
Mali’s foreign affairs minister, Abdoulaye Diop, has said the force will be operational by the end of 2017, but United Nations approval is still pending. Under the U.N. Charter, such a force must be approved by the U.N. Security Council.
In April, the Peace and Security Council of the African Union approved a Strategic Concept of Operations (CONOPs) for the “G5 Sahel Joint Force,” though again there were few specifics. It authorized “the deployment of the Joint Force of the G5 for an initial period of twelve months renewable and a strength of up to 5,000 personnel, including military, civilian and police components.” The force would “combat terrorism, drug trafficking and human trafficking” and contribute to the “restoration of state authority and the return of displaced persons and refugees.”
The Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) created in 2015 to fight Boko Haram will likely provide a model for the G5 Sahel Joint Force. Operations under the MNJTF, which is headquartered in N’Djamena, Chad, and includes troops from Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Benin, are mostly bilateral or trilateral, with each country leading its own troops. The role of headquarters is to coordinate plans from participating countries and facilitate cooperation with partners like France and the U.S.
Given that the Sahel region is much larger than the Lake Chad region, it’s highly unlikely that the G5 Sahel Joint Force would adopt a centralized architecture with a command that could, for example, send Mauritanian soldiers to fight in northern Chad. The force is more likely to focus on strengthening military cooperation along borders shared by member states. In February, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, Burkina Faso’s president, announced new joint patrols to ensure security in border regions. Three focus areas can be clearly identified: sections of the Mali-Mauritania shared border; the shared border zone of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, which has been hit for several months now by regular attacks from various jihadi groups; and the shared border of Niger and Chad. The architecture might be inspired by the border security system Chad and Sudan created in 2009, with military outposts on each side of the border able to communicate with each other and coordinate responses to imminent threats.
WPR: How might this force complement other forces in the region fighting militant groups, specifically Operation Barkhane, the anti-Boko Haram MJNTF and MINUSMA? What needs might it serve that these other forces don’t?
Desgrais: Ensuring the effective collaboration of all military forces present in the Sahel will be a big challenge in the coming years. Their mandates and aims are quite different even if they overlap geographically.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, has around 13,000 personnel and was given a more robust mandate by the U.N. Security Council in 2016, but it cannot engage in large offensive operations against terrorist armed groups. Apart from the current debate about the evolution of U.N. peacekeeping mandates and their neutrality, MINUSMA’s capabilities are not sufficient to engage in a real fight against well-trained, well-equipped and determined jihadi terrorists.
Operation Barkhane, a French counterterror military deployment composed of more than 4,000 personnel spread over three coutnries, has the mandate and the capabilities to lead offensive operations in northern Mali as well as in other G5 Sahel countries, as recent operations in Burkina Faso showed. The main goal of Barkhane, after containing the jihadi threat, is to support the national armies of the G5 Sahel countries by providing training, conducting exercises and launching multilateral operations. Since December 2014, Barkhane and G5 Sahel countries have launched several trilateral operations in sensitive borderlands. Building up African partners’ capabilities and strengthening military cooperation between them is the only way for French troops to one day leave the region.
The MNJTF, with 11,000 personnel, has a very specific mandate, namely to fight Boko Haram and its splinter groups operating around Lake Chad, along the Komadugu River in the Niger-Nigeria border region, in the Mandara Mountains along the Cameroon-Nigeria border, and in Boko Haram’s sanctuary in Nigeria’s Sambisa forest.
The newly created—and yet to be clearly defined—G5 Sahel Joint Force will create a security mechanism in sensitive borderlands where terrorist armed groups have been proliferating for years now. It might one day become a permanent mechanism replacing current occasional operations involving G5 Sahel countries and Barkhane support. However, it is clear that the international footprint in the Sahel won’t disappear anytime soon given the challenges facing local armies and the growing strength of the region’s terror groups.
WPR: What is the strength of the participating countries’ militaries, and how do they match up against the militant groups they’re trying to root out?
Desgrais: Unfortunately, to fight jihadi armed groups engaged in asymmetrical warfare, national armies need capabilities that few countries in the region possess.
Intelligence is a cornerstone. First, human intelligence is vital to understand what the social dynamics are in a specific area and to assess the degree of jihadi penetration. In the Sahara-Sahel region, this requires good relationships with local tribes willing to collaborate with central authorities. Jihadi groups constantly threaten and attack local leaders and populations to prevent information about their presence and movements from being shared.
Second, signals intelligence requires intercepting communications. This kind of intelligence is highly technological and very expensive to obtain. G5 Sahel member states mostly rely on international partners like France, the U.K., the U.S. and Algeria for this.
Third, geospatial intelligence, which is gathered from satellites, aerial photography and mapping data, is very important in identifying bases and sanctuaries for jihadi groups. Like signals intelligence, this kind of intelligence is very expensive and out of the question for countries that struggle to give their militaries even conventional equipment.
Once you have a pretty good idea of where jihadi fighters are located and you have the political will to engage in a fight against them, you need substantial operational capabilities, including well-trained and well-equipped soldiers, aerial support, transport capabilities, strong logistics to supply operations, and the means for medical evacuation. Most jihadi groups operate in remote areas, far from the capital cities where military means are usually concentrated. Military outposts are more equipped to counter potential attacks than to launch operations hundreds of kilometers away. Apart from Chad, the G5 Sahel countries have weak or nonexistent air forces and face huge challenges to pay, equip and train their own special and conventional ground forces.
Military capabilities are difficult and expensive to acquire, maintain, develop and adapt to evolving threats such as those posed by jihadi groups. The hope is that the G5 Sahel Force can allow for cross-border cooperation while facilitating assistance from strategic partners, especially in intelligence matters.
