Earlier this week, the US declassified information revealing that the Wagner Group was trying to procure weapons for the Kremlin from Africa, specifically Mali.
Russia’s Wagner Group has recently provided Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with surface-to-air missiles, the US said Thursday as it rolled out new sanctions against the Russian mercenary group.
North Africa morphing into a permanent host destination rather than a transit country on the way to Europe for hundreds of thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans is no news. What is new, however, is a rising Afrocentric discourse across social media platforms calling for “reappropriating” North Africa and “chasing” the non-black inhabitants of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia from the continent on the pretense that they are illegitimately colonizing the land.
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.”
While a precarious ceasefire has uneasily prevailed in Libya since the end of its third bout of civil war in 2020, the country is increasingly showing signs of an eventual relapse into conflict today. This may be why many policymakers were quick to hail as a breakthrough the appointment of Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathily as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) for Libya and head of the United Nations (UN) Support Mission to Libya in September. After two months into the job, SRSG Bathily may be quickly realizing that Libya’s war never abated, and that it is now simply fought by other means in the halls of the UN and corridors of foreign capitals.
When
May 30, 2023
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm
Where
Zoom Webinar
A report has revealed that the British Special Air Service and the European country’s other special forces have carried out operations clandestinely in Nigeria and 18 other nations for the past 12 years.
This was corroborated by an incident in 2012 when a group of SBS commandos attempted and failed to rescue a Briton and an Italian held by an Islamist group in Nigeria.
The US and other donors should avoid bailing out the country in ways that bolster Abiy’s personal political agenda.
For decades, Ethiopians were accustomed to their politics moving at a glacial pace, punctuated by rare but decisive regime turnover. Citizens didn’t know what their rulers were up to, but they were confident conspiracies hatched in the palace and party headquarters would be executed efficiently.
The truth is that no one was doing the basics of multilateral diplomacy to prevent the bloody power struggle we’re witnessing today.
Sudan is tearing itself apart, and Washington is watching, seemingly unable to do anything to stop the carnage. America’s diplomats lament that the U.S. has lost leverage. The truth is that no one is doing the basics of multilateral diplomacy — coordinating disparate actors.
Given the number of potential spoilers and intruders, the US and other peace brokers urgently need to bring in the United Nations.
Sudan’s war is on the brink of igniting a regional ring of fire. That can be prevented — but it needs the United Nations to play its role.