Lead by the Junta Following a meeting with their counterparts, Moussa Salaou Barmou, the head of Niger’s military forces, said on Wednesday that Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali had decided to form a combined force to address security challenges in their respective countries.
The move represents the most recent indication of increased alignment to occur since the three neighbors in the insurgency-ravaged central Sahel area of West Africa broke military relations with long-standing allies, notably France, and established the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), a cooperative organization.
Barmou made a public announcement announcing that the new task force will be “operational as soon as possible to meet the security challenges,” but she withheld information about the unit’s composition and purview.
Since the military of the three nations took control in a series of coups from 2020 to 2023, violence in the area has gotten worse, driven by the ten-year conflict with Islamist organizations associated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Conflict-related deaths in the central Sahel reached a peak in 2023, according to the U.S.-based crisis-monitoring group ACLED, which cited estimates of nearly 8,000 deaths in Burkina Faso alone the year before. These deaths rose by 38% from the previous year.