Year in review: Too many crises to keep count of in Africa’s Sahel belt as 2023 comes to a close

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Updated 24 December 2023
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Year in review: Too many crises to keep count of in Africa’s Sahel belt as 2023 comes to a close

  • Millions of migrants and refugees were on the move in 2023 after the outbreak of war in Sudan and a coup in Niger
  • The region’s political upheavals and security threats have become a major concern for Europe and the Arab world

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania: With world attention riveted on the war raging in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, conflicts elsewhere, particularly the violence in Sudan and instability across the Sahel, are in danger of being forgotten.

The Sahel belt of Africa, stretching from Mali in the west to Sudan in the east, was catapulted into the global spotlight in early 2023 by a wave of political upheaval, humanitarian challenges, and security threats.

Given its strategic significance for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, the region’s recent spate of coups, extremist insurgencies, and proliferation of migration routes have made it a particular source of concern for policy planners.

International actors, from former colonial rulers including France to multilateral bodies such as the African Union, have been left increasingly concerned by a perceived disinterest in the region and a failure to help resolve problems.




In April 2023, fighting between Sudan's army and the paramilitary forces of Mohammed Dagalo broke out, sending tens of thousands of people fleeing their homes. (AFP)

Sudan crisis

The region’s first major upheaval of 2023 arose in Sudan, where violence erupted in mid-April between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, triggering a massive wave of displacement that has since rippled through neighboring countries.

The capital, Khartoum, the troubled Darfur region, and other parts of the country have ended the year ravaged by fighting and mass displacement, triggering an economic collapse, the disintegration of the health system, and a growing risk of famine.

The recruitment of foreign fighters from across the wider Sahel, many of them children and destitute farmers driven to desperation, has led to fears the conflict could spill over into the wider region, proliferating the spread of light weaponry and destabilizing neighboring states.




The  conflict in Sudan has revived fears about children being exploited by the warring sides to fight. (AFP/File)

Saudi Arabia and the US have brokered multiple rounds of ceasefire talks with Sudan’s warring parties, while the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, an eight-country trade bloc in Africa, has also sought to reach a settlement.

As for a domestic resolution, initial hopes for a non-military government in Sudan, after the military overthrew the civilian-led administration in late 2021, have been all but dashed.

Aid agencies have issued repeated calls for the warring parties to stop perpetrating violence against civilians, particularly women and girls, shedding light on the humanitarian dimensions of the turmoil.

Experts have also warned that the conflict and resulting breakdown of government authority could be exploited by extremist groups such as Daesh and Al-Qaeda, or open the way for the creation of new radical organizations with similar objectives.




Experts have warned that the conflict and resulting breakdown of government authority could be exploited by extremist groups such as Daesh and Al-Qaeda to pursue their goals. (AFP/File)

Niger coup

Amid the focus on Sudan, the international community was caught off guard in July when a coup in Niger marked the latest in a series of military takeovers in the region — Mali and Burkina Faso having witnessed coups of their own in recent years.

This development underscored the fragility of governance structures in the Sahel, raising questions about the efficacy of international efforts to promote stability and democratic institutions.

Niger, a landlocked country of 25 million, had been a beneficiary of Western programs aimed at stopping migrants from traveling further north. However, the junta turned its back on the West, aligning with the broad public sentiment that little of this money had trickled down to local communities.




Niger's National Council for Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP) seized power in the West African nation in July 2023, aggravating the political crisis in the region. (AFP)

The coup had wider implications, particularly for the flow of migrants transiting through the region.

Prior to the coup, Niger had worked with Western governments to help manage these migration routes. As a result, European states looked to Tunisia and Libya to control irregular migration across the Mediterranean Sea.

In tandem with these developments, support for anti-immigration politicians has grown across Europe. In turn, moderates have been forced into offering heightened border protections and revised asylum policies to head off electoral challenges.




Migrants wait to be saved by the Aquarius rescue ship run by the "SOS Mediterranee" and "Medecins Sans Frontieres" (Doctors Without Borders) off Libya in the Mediterranean Sea on August 2, 2017. (AFP)

Storms and earthquakes

Beyond the conflicts and coups, nature also made its capacity for devastation felt in September when Morocco was hit by a catastrophic earthquake and Libya suffered cataclysmic flooding, leaving thousands dead and many more missing.

These twin disasters sparked a global aid response, but the support delivered to suffering Moroccans differed greatly from that provided to Libya, with the latter remaining closed off to the world, while militias preyed on the local population and the large number of migrants transiting through the country.




A man searches through the rubble in the earthquake-hit village of Imi N’Tala, in central Morocco on October 5, 2023. (AFP/File)

Displacement

The result of these multiple, overlapping disasters has been the mass displacement of the Sahel’s population, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. International agencies have drawn particular attention to the ongoing recruitment of child soldiers across the Sahel.

The spread of child exploitation added a grim dimension to an already complex set of challenges and underscored the need for international cooperation to protect the most vulnerable in times of crisis.

Simultaneously, the UN expressed alarm about the mounting hunger crisis in Sudan. This humanitarian emergency added urgency to the critical need for food assistance and aid to address the escalating challenges faced by the population.




Children queue for food at a refugee center for people displaced by the war in Sudan, in tis July 2023 photo. (AFP/File)

By November, warnings had reemerged about the potential for a genocide in Sudan’s Darfur, echoing past tragedies in the region. Analysts said this ominous development underscored the need to address the root causes of conflict, prompting renewed calls for diplomatic initiatives and peacekeeping efforts.

The year drew to a close with the fall of Sudan’s city of Wad Madani to the RSF, despite recent ceasefire talks and prior US warnings. The RSF’s latest battlefield success followed three days of intense fighting, leading to a mass exodus of residents toward the south and the suspension of operations by aid organizations.

The tragic result of these mass displacement episodes was made all too clear on Dec. 16 when 61 migrants, many of them from Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, drowned in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya when the small smuggling vessel they were traveling in got into difficulty.

Signs of hope

Perhaps the only positive news emanating from the region in the closing days of 2023 was the US helping to foster reconciliation between Algeria and Morocco in addressing the Western Sahara conflict.




UN's Western Sahara envoy Staffan de Mistura (L) shakes hands with Polisario leader Brahim Ghali (R) in Algeria's southwestern city of Tindouf. (AFP/File)

A persistent source of contention between the two Arab neighbors, the disputed nature of the territory also bears significance for external actors owing to its role as a transit point for Africans migrating toward Spain.

If one lesson can be drawn from the past 12 months, analysts believe it is the need for comprehensive solutions, addressing both the root causes of the many overlapping conflicts in the Sahel and their broader impact on migration patterns.

 


India’s leader Modi touted all was well in Kashmir. A massacre of tourists shattered that claim

Updated 07 May 2025
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India’s leader Modi touted all was well in Kashmir. A massacre of tourists shattered that claim

  • The attack outraged people in Kashmir and India, where it led to calls of swift action against Pakistan

SRINAGAR, India: Hundreds of Indian tourists, families and honeymooners, drawn by the breathtaking Himalayan beauty, were enjoying a picture-perfect meadow in Kashmir. They didn’t know gunmen in army fatigues were lurking in the woods.
When the attackers got their chance, they shot mostly Indian Hindu men, many of them at close-range, leaving behind bodies strewn across the Baisaran meadow and survivors screaming for help.
The gunmen quickly vanished into thick forests. By the time Indian authorities arrived, 26 people were dead and 17 others were wounded.
India has described the April 22 massacre as a terror attack and blamed Pakistan for backing it, an accusation denied by Islamabad. India swiftly announced diplomatic actions against its archrival Pakistan, which responded with its own tit-for-tat measures.
The assailants are still on the run, as calls in India for military action against Pakistan are growing.
World leaders have been scrambling to de-escalate the tensions between two nuclear-armed neighbors, which have historically relied on third countries for conflict management.
But the massacre has also touched a raw nerve.
Early on Wednesday, India fired missiles that struck at least three locations inside Pakistani-controlled territory, according to Pakistani security officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. India said it was striking infrastructure used by militants.
India admits security lapse
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has governed Kashmir with an iron fist in recent years, claiming militancy in the region was in check and a tourism influx was a sign of normalcy returning.
Those claims now lie shattered.
Security experts and former intelligence and senior military officers who have served in the region say Modi’s government — riding on a nationalistic fervor over Kashmir to please its supporters — missed warning signs.
The government acknowledged that in a rare admission.
Two days after the attack, Kiren Rijiju, India’s parliamentary affairs minister, said that a crucial all-party meeting discussed “where the lapses occurred.”
“We totally missed ... the intentions of our hostile neighbor,” said Avinash Mohananey, a former Indian intelligence officer who has operated in Kashmir and Pakistan.
The meadow, near the resort town of Pahalgam, can be reached by trekking or pony rides, and visitors cross at least three security camps and a police station to reach there. According to Indian media, there was no security presence for more than 1,000 tourists that day.
Pahalgam serves as a base for an annual Hindu pilgrimage that draws hundreds of thousands of people from across India. The area is ringed by thick woods that connect with forest ranges in the Jammu area, where Indian troops have faced attacks by rebels in recent years after fighting ebbed in the Kashmir Valley, the heart of an anti-India rebellion.
The massacre brought Modi’s administration almost back to where it started when a suicide car bombing in the region in 2019 prompted his government to strip Kashmir of its semi-autonomy and bring it under direct federal rule. Tensions have simmered ever since, but the region has also drawn millions of visitors amid a strange calm enforced by an intensified security crackdown.
“We probably started buying our own narrative that things were normal in Kashmir,” Mohananey said.
In the past, insurgents have carried out brazen attacks and targeted Hindu pilgrims, Indian Hindu as well as Muslim immigrant workers, and local Hindus and Sikhs. However, this time a large number of tourists were attacked, making it one of the worst massacres involving civilians in recent years.
The attack outraged people in Kashmir and India, where it led to calls of swift action against Pakistan.
Indian television news channels amplified these demands and panelists argued that India should invade Pakistan. Modi and his senior ministers vowed to hunt down the attackers and their backers.
Experts say much of the public pressure on the Indian government to act militarily against Pakistan falls within the pattern of long, simmering animosity between both countries.
“All the talk of military options against Pakistan mainly happens in echo chambers and feeds a nationalist narrative,” in India, New Delhi-based counterterrorism expert Ajai Sahni said.
“It doesn’t matter what will be done. We will be told it was done and was a success,” he said. “And it will be celebrated nonetheless.”
Modi’s optimism misplaced, experts say
Experts also say that the Modi government’s optimism was also largely misplaced and that its continuous boasting of rising tourism in the region was a fragile barometer of normalcy. Last year, Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s top elected official, cautioned against such optimism.
“By this attack, Pakistan wants to convey that there is no normalcy in Kashmir and that tourism is no indicator for it. They want to internationalize the issue,” said D.S. Hooda, former military commander for northern India between 2014 to 2016.
Hooda said the “choice of targets and the manner in which the attack was carried out indicates that it was well-planned.”
“If there would have been a good security cover, maybe this incident would not have happened,” he said.
India sees Pakistan connection to the attack
Indian security experts believe the attack could be a retaliation for a passenger train hijacking in Pakistan in March by Baloch insurgents. Islamabad accused New Delhi of orchestrating the attack in which 25 people were killed. India denies it.
Mohananey said that Indian authorities should have taken the accusations seriously and beefed-up security in Kashmir, while arguing there was a striking similarity in both attacks since only men were targeted.
“It was unusual that women and children were spared” in both cases, Mohananey said.
Two senior police officers, who have years of counterinsurgency experience in Kashmir, said after the train attack in Pakistan that they were anticipating some kind of reaction in the region by militants.
The officers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that security officials perceived the threat of an imminent attack, and Modi’s inauguration of a strategic rail line in the region was canceled. A large-scale attack on tourists, however, wasn’t anticipated, because there was no such precedence, the officers said.
Hooda, who commanded what New Delhi called “surgical strikes” against militants in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir in 2016, said that the attack has deepened thinking that it was time to tackle the Pakistani state, not just militants.
Such calculus could be a marked shift. In 2016 and 2019, India said that its army struck militant infrastructure inside Pakistan after two major militant attacks against its soldiers.
“After this attack,” Hooda said, India wants to stop Pakistan “from using terrorism as an instrument of state policy.”
“We need to tighten our security and plug lapses, but the fountainhead of terrorism needs to be tackled,” Hooda said. “The fountainhead is Pakistan.”


Trump says only 21 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza now believed to be alive

Updated 07 May 2025
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Trump says only 21 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza now believed to be alive

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Tuesday that three hostages held by Hamas in Gaza have died, leaving only 21 believed to be still living.
“As of today, it’s 21, three have died,” Trump said of the hostages being held by Hamas, noting until recently it had been 24 people believed to be living. He did not elaborate on the identities of those now believed to be dead, nor how he had come to learn of their deaths. “There’s 21, plus a lot of dead bodies,” Trump said.
One American, Edan Alexander, had been among the 24 hostages believed to be alive, with the bodies of several other Americans also held by Hamas after its Oct. 7, 2023 assault on Israel.
The president’s comments came as Israel approved plans on Monday to seize the Gaza Strip and to stay in the Palestinian territory for an unspecified amount of time, in a bid to recover the hostages and try to fulfill its war aims of destroying Hamas. If implemented, the move would vastly expand Israel’s operations there and likely draw fierce international opposition.


Columbia University lays off nearly 180 after Trump pulled $400M over his antisemitism concerns

Updated 07 May 2025
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Columbia University lays off nearly 180 after Trump pulled $400M over his antisemitism concerns

  • Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment and seized a campus building in April, leading to dozens of arrests and inspiring a wave of similar protests nationally

NEW YORK: Columbia University said Tuesday that it will be laying off nearly 180 staffers in response to President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel $400 million in funding over the Manhattan college’s handling of student protests against the war in Gaza.
Those receiving non-renewal or termination notices Tuesday represent about 20 percent of the employees funded in some manner by the terminated federal grants, the university said in a statement Tuesday.
“We have had to make deliberate, considered decisions about the allocation of our financial resources,” the university said. “Those decisions also impact our greatest resource, our people. We understand this news will be hard.”
Officials are working with the Trump administration in the hopes of getting the funding restored, they said, but the university will still pull back spending because of uncertainty and strain on its budget.
Officials said the university will be scaling back research, with some departments winding down activities and others maintaining some level of research while pursuing alternate funding.
In March, the Trump administration pulled the funding over what it described as the Ivy League school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023.
Within weeks, Columbia capitulated to a series of demands laid out by the Republican administration as a starting point for restoring the funding.
Among the requirements was overhauling the university’s student disciplinary process, banning campus protesters from wearing masks, barring demonstrations from academic buildings, adopting a new definition of antisemitism and putting the Middle Eastern studies program under the supervision of a vice provost who would have a say over curriculum and hiring.
After Columbia announced the changes, US Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the university was ” on the right track,” but declined to say when or if Columbia’s funding would be restored. Spokespersons for the federal education department didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
Columbia was at the forefront of US campus protests over the war last spring. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment and seized a campus building in April, leading to dozens of arrests and inspiring a wave of similar protests nationally.
Trump, when he retook the White House in January, moved swiftly to cut federal money to colleges and universities he viewed as too tolerant of antisemitism.


Trump hopes India-Pakistan clashes end ‘very quickly’

Updated 07 May 2025
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Trump hopes India-Pakistan clashes end ‘very quickly’

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he hoped clashes between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan end “very quickly,” after New Delhi’s forces launched strikes and Islamabad vowed retaliation.
“It’s a shame, we just heard about it,” Trump said at the White House, after the Indian government said it had hit “terrorist camps” on its western neighbor’s territory following a deadly attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir.
“I guess people knew something was going to happen based on the past. They’ve been fighting for many, many decades and centuries, actually, if you really think about it,” he added.
India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars since gaining independence from the British in 1947. Both claim Kashmir in full but administer separate portions of the disputed region.
“I just hope it ends very quickly,” said Trump.
India had been widely expected to respond militarily since gunmen shot dead 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir, mostly Hindus.
New Delhi has blamed militants that it has said were from Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, a UN-designated terrorist organization.
Pakistan’s army said the Indian strikes targeted three sites in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and two in Punjab province, the country’s most populous.
Islamabad said that three civilians, including a child, had been killed in Indian strikes.
The Indian strikes came just hours after the US State Department issued a fresh call for calm.
“We continue to urge Pakistan and India to work toward a responsible resolution that maintains long-term peace and regional stability in South Asia,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters.
Her statement came after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned of stopping water from flowing across borders following the Kashmir attack.


‘World cannot afford’ India-Pakistan confrontation: UN

Updated 07 May 2025
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‘World cannot afford’ India-Pakistan confrontation: UN

UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “very concerned” about Indian military strikes on Pakistan, his spokesperson said on Tuesday, hours after India said it hit nine sites in Pakistani territory.
“The Secretary-General is very concerned about the Indian military operations across the Line of Control and international border. He calls for maximum military restraint from both countries. The world cannot afford a military confrontation between India and Pakistan,” said Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson.