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The military junta in Mali has alienated regional and international security partners amid escalating violence by militant Islamist groups, leading to a spike in civilian fatalities.

Since taking power in August 2020, the military junta in Mali has alienated its regional and international security partners and pursued a strategy that has exacerbated the militant Islamist violence threatening the country, thereby accelerating the security crisis in the Sahel.

Continuing a decade-long upward trend, violent events linked to militant Islamist groups in Africa increased by 22 percent while fatalities surged by 48 percent over the past year.

The signing of a permanent ceasefire agreement between Libya’s warring factions on October 23 was widely marketed as a watershed moment that would redress the country’s spiraling trajectory. Paving the way for the United Nations-hosted Libyan Political Dialogue Forum to relaunch on October 26, the agreement was also the building block for the first United Nations-mediated meeting inside Libya in years. On November 1, the Joint Military Commission (5+5)—military representatives of the Eastern-based Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) and the Government of National Accord, who are aligned with General Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA)—met in the border town of Ghadames to discuss ways to solidify their bare-boned ceasefire agreement. Yet, the international exhilaration that accompanied the launch of these talks obfuscates the very real possibility of a relapse into violent conflict. There are legitimate doubts over the fealty of local and international stakeholders—such as Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates—to the security track’s basic conditions. There is also the overhanging question as to whether the political and economic tracks complementing this very agreement are setting it up for failure by design.

The new Turkish assertiveness in Libya and Libya National Army (LNA) General Khalifa Haftar’s strategic retreat from the Western part of the country have created a new equilibrium in the conflict. This is a potential watershed moment that could lead Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Russia to rethink their support for Haftar and prepare a possible compromise over Libya, especially given the pronunciation of the so-called Cairo Declaration on June 6, 2020. In fact, Haftar is gradually losing internal and external support—from within his own forces to Egypt and the UAE—to the point that no one will likely bet on him again. In this fluid scenario, neighboring Egypt, which has emboldened Haftar since 2014, may play an important new role in order to protect its specific foreign and domestic interests in Libya.

A couple of weeks after a state institution in Tripoli was stormed by gunmen and a suicide bomber in 2018, I was sitting in a Tunis café with a friend who had been working in the building on the day of the terrorist attack. Aymenn believed that the suicide bomber was wandering the premises in the run-up to the tragedy and had walked by his desk. He described a beatific smile on the man’s face. “He was drugged up in some way,” Aymenn said. “And this is the thing that kept running through my head: He definitely wasn’t Libyan.”

Introduction: Rich Africa

Africa is undoubtedly the continent best endowed with natural resources. With a surface area of approximately 30.3 million square kilometers, if one includes the island areas, the continent covers about a sixth of the surface of the globe and one-fifth of the world’s land mass. Today, it is home to approximately 1.2 billion people, or 17 percent of the world’s population, unevenly distributed over 55 states. As a whole, it has a population density average, of about 35 people per square kilometer compared to 47 per square kilometer globally. This average is 4 times lower than that of the European Union, for example. However, the average population growth is very high, and according to population projections, the African population is expected to double by 2050. (1)

Eni announced Tuesday that it has achieved the closing for the acquisition of BP business in Algeria, regarding the two gas-producing concessions “In Amenas” and “In Salah”, which are jointly operated with Sonatrach and Equinor.