Abou Obeida Youssef al-Annabi est l’émir d’Al-Qaïda au Maghreb islamique, la branche sahélienne de la centrale terroriste Al-Qaïda. Ses prétentions d’extension au Sahel n’ont « aucune limite », dit-il dans une interview exclusive accordée à Wassim Nasr, journaliste à France 24.
Doha maintains its objectives in the region, but opts for pragmatism after ironing out differences with its Gulf neighbours
The Arab Spring put the Gulf states in competition to gain weight and influence on a regional scale. The revolutionary onslaught that subdued Ben Ali’s Tunisia, Gaddafi’s Libya and Mubarak’s Egypt in a matter of weeks did not take long to suffer interference from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which sought to strengthen their internal allies by taking advantage of the prevailing chaos in a strategic area due to its energy resources and its endless connections with sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean.
On December 13, 2022, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi issued a presidential decree demarcating the country’s maritime borders with Libya. The presidential decree is believed to cut off thousands of square kilometers of Libya’s maritime zone. Egypt’s unilateral move was taken without prior consultation or negotiation with the Libyans, raising many questions about its content, timing, and justifications.
The war in Ukraine has brought Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group to the forefront, with the United States now focusing on countering their presence beyond Ukraine, particularly in Africa.
One theatre Washington is now prioritizing as part of this burgeoning effort is Libya, where Russia’s influence is mainly projected through Wagner mercenaries. There, Wagner has acted as the Kremlin’s surreptitious foreign policy tool for over three years, significantly expanding its footprint in the country after supporting General Khalifa Haftar in his failed attack to capture Tripoli and oust Libya’s United Nations-recognized government in 2019. Quelling Wagner’s influence in Libya will be challenging, as the US must address Libyan realities and unite Europe and regional powers to support its foreign policy endeavor.
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.
The war in Ukraine has brought Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group to the forefront, with the United States now focusing on countering their presence beyond Ukraine, particularly in Africa.
One theatre Washington is now prioritizing as part of this burgeoning effort is Libya, where Russia’s influence is mainly projected through Wagner mercenaries. There, Wagner has acted as the Kremlin’s surreptitious foreign policy tool for over three years, significantly expanding its footprint in the country after supporting General Khalifa Haftar in his failed attack to capture Tripoli and oust Libya’s United Nations-recognized government in 2019. Quelling Wagner’s influence in Libya will be challenging, as the US must address Libyan realities and unite Europe and regional powers to support its foreign policy endeavor.
The era of French interference in African affairs is “well over”, President Emmanuel Macron said in Gabon on Thursday during his four-nation tour of central Africa.
Speaking on the fringes of an environment summit in the Gabonese capital Libreville, Macron said France harboured no desire to return to past policies of interfering in Africa.
There may be questions about whether Russia is winning the war in Ukraine, but there is no doubt it is winning the global war against the West. And it’s starting in Africa
Pundits have for months claimed that Ukraine has made great advances on the battlefield and taken back considerable swathes of territory that Russia held. While this claim is losing its validity in recent weeks there, most western analysts indulge themselves with their own blinded dogma and refuse to look at the bigger Ukraine war: commonly known as the ‘global south’ but in reality is actually just the ‘rest of the world’ beyond the boundaries of so-called western countries.
A French court has dismissed a landmark lawsuit against controversial TotalEnergies projects in east Africa, which was filed by six French and Ugandan activist groups in 2018, using a 2017 law on multinationals operating outside France.