AA / Tunis / Majdi Ismail
The Nigerien Minister of Defense, General Salifou Mody, announced on Tuesday January 21 the imminent creation of a unified military force of 5,000 men as part of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), a confederation composed of Mali , Burkina Faso and Niger.
These three Sahelian countries successively withdrew from the G5 Sahel, an institutional framework for coordination and regional cooperation in terms of development and security policies, created in 2014 by five countries of the Sahelo-Saharan strip, Burkina Faso, Mali , Mauritania, Niger and Chad.
”In this common space, our forces will now be able to intervene together,” General Salifou Mody declared on Tuesday, during an interview on Nigerien public television, ”Télé Sahel”.
He specified that this ”unified force, which is practically ready, has a strength of 5,000 men”.
”This unified force will not only have its personnel, but its air assets, its land assets, its intelligence assets and, of course, its coordination system,” he added, specifying that it is a ”matter of weeks” before it is operational across the entire territory of the alliance to face cross-border terrorist threats.
-The three countries of the AES constitute a vast landlocked territory of 2.8 million square kilometers, four times the size of France. They have faced recurring attacks from armed groups linked to Al-Qaeda or Daesh for a decade.
”We are in the same space, we face the same types of threats, in particular this threat from criminal groups. We had to pool our efforts,” declared the Nigerien Minister of Defense. ”It’s new, it’s original and it’s reassuring for our space and for our populations,” he underlined.
Bamako, N’Djamena and Ouagadougou have announced their departure from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional organization which they consider particularly ineffective in the face of their security challenges. This departure will be effective on January 29, one year after the announcement, in accordance with the organization’s texts.
The AES also accuses ECOWAS of being subservient to France, a former colonial power, with which they have multiplied acts of rupture.
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