It’s Time to Rethink West Africa’s Intersecting Security Challenges

Last month, Islamist fighters attacked a military post in Togo, killing eight soldiers and wounding 13 others. Benin has experienced at least nine recorded attacks attributed to Islamist militant groups in its borderlands since December 2021. And in a February incident in Benin’s northern tripoint area bordering Niger and Burkina Faso, a patrol team struck several improvised explosive devices, killing eight people, including four Beninese park rangers. The attacks point to a trend in recent years in which militant Islamist groups in the Sahel subregion of West Africa have increasingly targeted littoral countries to the south. That wasn’t supposed to happen. At the outset of the insurgencies that have undermined security in the Sahel […]