It’s not a full-scale disaster for the French but very close to that,” Jezequel said.Īfter weeks of rallies against France, Macron’s announcement provoked apparently spontaneous celebrations in Niamey, the capital. They did not stop the progress of the jihadists and they have ruined their relationship with three former colonies. “It is a failure of their intervention whatever the French say. Jean-Hervé Jezequel, director of the Sahel Project at International Crisis Group, said events in Niger marked “the beginning of the end of a sequence of French troops withdrawing from the central Sahel. In his address, Macron insisted that French troops were “not to be held hostages by putschists” who he described as “friends of chaos”.Īnalysts have described a near disaster for French policy in the Sahel. Social media channels associated with the Russian state in August launched a major effort to exploit the coup in Niger, possibly seeking to open opportunities for intervention. The Kremlin has been making a big push to expand its influence and presence in sub-Saharan Africa, often at the expense of France. There and in Mali, French officials have pointed to a flood of Russian propaganda as a significant destabilising force. Macron added that military cooperation was over and French troops would withdraw in “the months and weeks to come”.Ībout 1,500 French troops have been stationed in Niger as part of a broader campaign against Islamic extremist militants across the Sahel region, but were recently reinforced when Paris was forced to redeploy forces from Mali after a military coup there.Ī third coup also forced Paris to withdraw forces from Burkina Faso, another former French colony. The announcement appeared to end two months of defiance in which Paris’s ambassador had been kept in place in Niamey despite coup leaders ordering him to leave. “In the next hours our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France.” “France has decided to withdraw its ambassador,” Macron told French television.
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