EGN NEWS DESK
Having slipped undetected into Mali’s capital weeks in the past, the jihadis struck simply earlier than daybreak prayers. They killed dozens of scholars at an elite police coaching academy, stormed Bamako’s airport and set the presidential jet on fireplace. The Sept. 17 assault was essentially the most brazen since 2016 in a capital metropolis within the Sahel, an enormous arid area stretching throughout sub-Saharan Africa south of the Sahara Desert.
It confirmed that jihadist teams with hyperlinks to al-Qaida or the Islamic State group, whose largely rural insurgency has killed hundreds of civilians and displaced tens of millions in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, may also strike on the coronary heart of energy. Overshadowed by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan, battle within the Sahel hardly ever garners international headlines, but it’s contributing to a pointy rise in migration from the area towards Europe at a time when anti-immigrant far-right events are on the rise and a few EU states are tightening their borders.
According to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), the path to Europe with the steepest rise in numbers this yr is by way of West African coastal nations to Spain’s Canary Islands.
