Western governments need to drop any objections to dealing with dictatorships in the Sahel and urgently engage with regimes in what is rapidly becoming “the most terrorism-affected region in the world”, former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s think-tank has urged.
The Sahel, the semi-arid strip below the Sahara that has been rocked by a wave of coups over the past four years, accounted for nearly half of all terrorism deaths worldwide in 2023, according to the Global Terrorism Index.
Groups affiliated with Isis and al-Qaeda were responsible for most of them, with Burkina Faso, which had two coups in 2022, suffering more deaths from terrorism than any other country, with 1,900 recorded fatalities.