On Saturday 25 April, while writing the lending of the final Chapter to my second volume on the GWOT in Africa, entitled War in the Sahel. I reckoned on having it ready for editing and indexing by Monday. The last chapter was about Trump. The more I tried to decide whether Trump was really serious about intervening in what is possibly the most remote and least understood part of Africa, the more I realised the chapter was reading like a new edition of President George W. Bush’s playbook on launching a ‘second’ or ‘Sahara front’ in his Global War on Terror (GWOT). That ‘front’, which soon spilled into Africa’s Sahel region through Bush’s ‘Pan-Sahel Initiative’ (PSI), was based, like the war on Iraq, on disinformation.
Bush’s PSI was ‘officially’ about ridding the Sahara-Sahel region of terrorists, some 30,000 of them according to US Air Force General Charles Wald. As my volume The Global War on Terror in the Sahara revealed, “draining the swamp”, as Wald described the Sahara, legitimised the PSI and provided the pretext for accessing Africa’s oil resources to ease America’s emerging energy crisis: the subject of Dick Cheney’s Report on the US’ energy problems, published in May 2001.
What was extraordinary about Bush’s PSI and my concluding chapter was not only that Trump, like Bush, was using the pretext of terrorism to justify securing access to Africa’s oil resources, but that now, more than two decades later, some of the same individuals who had served in Bush’s deception were playing a similar role in Trump’s administration.
As I contemplated how my concluding chapter sounded eerily like history repeating itself, a French news flash on my screen said something about a Trump shooting. Switching to English-language channels, I heard real-time reporting on the alleged assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in New York on 25 April. Running parallel to the New York news, was other breaking news, namely that Bamako, Mali’s capital, and other major towns across the country, including the Kati military base, had been under coordinated attack since dawn from the militant Islamic group, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), and the Front de Libération de l’Azawad (FLA), a Tuareg separatist movement. Azawad is the Tuareg name for northern Mali, for which the indigenous Tuareg have sought independence or autonomy for many years.
On Monday, it was confirmed that Mali’s Moscow-trained Defence Minister, Sadio Camara, the military junta’s key link with Moscow, who had played the lead role in inviting Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group to come to Mali in 2021 to replace the French in trying to rid the country of the militant Islamists, or ‘terrorists’, as they were called, was dead: killed by a car bomb at his home in Kati. It was also reported that Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries, now renamed the Africa Corps, had surrendered to the FLA after two days of fighting in the northern town of Kidal, the symbolic capital of Azawad, and had negotiated a safe withdrawal, taking with them what was left of the Malian army.
On Tuesday evening, General Assim Goïta, the junta’s leader, who had seized power in 2020, emerged from three days’ in hiding to declare on national TV that the security situation was “under control”, which it very clearly wasn’t.
During their more than four years in Mali, the Russians had done little to fight the Islamists, their ‘real’ job being to protect the junta, as in the two neighbouring junta-controlled states of Niger and Burkina Faso, which with Mali, now form a Russian-backed Association des États du Sahel (AES). The Russians’ main ‘military’ operation had been to accompany the Malian army, on Goïta’s orders, to perpetrate a genocide against Mali’s Tuareg peoples through late 2023 into 2025.
By around 6 May, the situation was marginally clearer through media reports. A much-weakened Goïta was still in the presidency, and Bamako still in the hands of the junta, but with its more than four million inhabitants very frightened and facing chronic food shortages as a result of JNIM’s forces, estimated at around 10,000, holding the city under siege. Food trucks from Morocco, via Mauritania, were being attacked by the jihadists and burnt. The situation in the rest of the country was uncertain with most cities reportedly being under siege from JNIM, hunger taking hold and unconfirmed reports of sporadic fighting. Kidal was in the hands of the FLA.
Goïta is claiming the 25 April attacks were an ‘inside job’ and is conducting a witch-hunt, arresting many soldiers, politicians and former military officers. Several opponents of the regime have been abducted and ‘disappeared’. Iyad ag Ghali, JNIM’s leader, is urging all Malians, including opposition politicians, iconic preachers such as Imam Mahmoud Dicko (in exile in Algeria) and dissatisfied members of the army to help topple the regime and form a shar’ia state. By shar’ia, Iyad means ‘soft’ shar’ia, which is not much different from the current traditional judicial system practiced throughout much of the country, but designed to stop his JNIM fighters defecting to the more hardline and extremist Islamic State in the Great Sahara (ISGS), which operates in the extreme east of the country and across the border into Niger and Burkina Faso.
The background to this situation goes back to 2012 when militant Islamists, backed by Algeria’s Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), hijacked an irredentist Tuareg movement, the precursor to the FLA, and moved into northern Mali. The incursion rapidly gained ground and agency, resulting in France’s military intervention in Mali in 2013 before expanding across the wider Sahel in a classic demonstration of failed counterterrorism. The several jihadist groups, often with roots in local community defence movements, expanded and in 2017 merged into the JNIM under the leadership of Iyad ag Ghali. Soon after, the ISGS emerged in Mali’s, Niger’s and Burkina Faso’s ‘three borders’ region but as a separate group to JNIM.
Gowing anti-French sentiment after France’s intervention, fuelled by Russian propaganda, managed largely at that time by Yevgeny Prigozhin, led to a military coup in Mali, followed by Russian-backed military juntas taking power in neighbouring Niger and Burkina Faso. By 2022, the French had almost entirely withdrawn, to be replaced by Prigozhin’s Wagner Group.
According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), 70,033 people have been killed in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger since 2016. Of these, 54,352 have died since the military juntas seized power. According to the Global Terrorism Index, Burkina Faso now tops the world rankings in terms of terrorism fatalities, with Mali and Niger in close pursuit. In 2025, Mali accounted for nearly half of all terrorism-related deaths worldwide. However, the most frightening aspect of these statistics is that over the last two years, the majority of killings have been committed by the AES’ own armies, followed by Russia’s Wagner Group (Africa Corps) with the jihadists now in third place. An estimated three million people have been displaced.
Although there are no signs of anyone, other than Goïta’s AES neighbours and Russia, which cannot afford the humiliation of being seen to abandon its African project, coming to Goïta’s aid, a few analysts, who know Mali well, are questioning whether Trump might follow through on the overtures his administration was making to the AES and Mali especially before getting carried away on his Iranian adventure.
Trump showed little interest in Africa during his first term. He had infamously called African countries ‘shitholes’, hinted at winding up AFRICOM and had withdrawn most US military personnel and assets from Somalia. Early in his second term, Trump again considered dismantling AFRICOM, also suggesting that the US should “shut down the embassies in Africa” and “bring our people home”.
Trump’s negativity towards Africa changed with the appointment on 1 April 2025 of Massad Boulos as his Senior Advisor for Africa. Massad Boulos is an American-Lebanese businessman, whose son, Michael Boulos married Trump’s daughter Tiffany in November 2022. So, while one son-in-law, Jared Kushner plies Saudi Arabia, Gaza, the Gulf States, Albania and the Balkans where his family business can make money on the back of Trump’s ‘worldview’ strategy, so Massad Boulos, who has extensive business interests in West Africa plies his trade in Africa. 48 hours after his appointment, Boulos was in Kinshasa negotiating a minerals deal with the DRC’s President Félix Tshisekedi on behalf of American companies.
Almost immediately after Boulos’ appointment, there were indications that Trump might bring the Sahel’s juntas in from the cold. Niger’s Prime Minister Lamine Zeine met with senior US State Department officials on 21 April (2025), to discuss bilateral and commercial ties. Three weeks later, US Ambassador to Niger Kathleen FitzGibbon presented her credentials to Niger’s president. During the last week of May, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for West Africa Will Stevens visited Burkina Faso and Niger, declaring that he sought to “stimulate a new dynamic of cooperation”. On 21-22 July, he visited Bamako to hold meetings with top government officials, including Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop, to discuss state sovereignty, peacebuilding, and counter-terrorism cooperation, while reaffirming America’s commitment to support Mali. He also announced plans to establish an American Chamber of Commerce to attract US investment in Mali’s mineral resources, notably gold and lithium.
Who was the driving force behind these attempts to rebuild US bridges with the AES? Boulos had much to do with it, as he has deep family and professional ties across West Africa. He is married to Sarah Fadoul Boulos, whose father, Zouhair el-Achkar Fadoul, is the patriarch of a powerful Lebanese business clan in West Africa. The Fadoul group, founded in Burkina Faso in 1966, and described as one of the most powerful business clans in West Africa, is a family-run conglomerate which operates across some ten countries in Central and West Africa, controlling more than 100 subsidiary companies. Boulos is CEO of SCOA Nigeria PLC, a heavy machinery and vehicle distribution company, which is part of the Fadoul Group.
While Boulos’ business interests would obviously benefit from the removal of the jihadist threat, there were elements in Washington wanting to keep tabs on both jihadist and Russian activity in the region. It is also conceivable that Trump may have been attracted by the region’s mineral resources – gold, uranium and lithium. It was also evident that the AES regimes preferred Trump’s transactional approach to that of the Biden administration, and especially Trump’s disdain for international law and human rights.
In September (2025), the Washington Post (WP) confirmed that the US had ramped up intelligence sharing with Mali’s junta to help repel the advance of Islamist extremists. US government officials said this was part of a broader push by the Trump administration to re-engage with the isolated junta. The Biden administration had been urging Mali’s junta to implement democratic reforms and had sanctioned several top officers for partnering with Russia’s Wagner Group. The fact that civilian deaths, along with torture, sexual violence and forced disappearances, had soared since the Russians’ arrival in Mali, was of no concern to the Trump administration. Trump’s deputy senior director for counterterrorism, Rudolph (Rudy) Atallah, told Malian officials in July that America wanted to help Mali in its fight against extremists – if Mali was a willing partner. Atallah said that everything from intelligence sharing to US equipment and training for Malian forces was on the table.
Atallah’s role in drawing the US back into the Sahel is significant. He had been appointed by Trump in January 2025 in apparent disregard of security clearance issues, having served as Bush’s Director of Counterterrorism in Africa when Bush launched the GWOT and the PSI. He was therefore not only versed in how disinformation had been used to legitimise those operations, but would have known that Iyad ag Ghali was an Algerian intelligence services’ (DRS) agent and that the creation of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), now part of Iyad’s JNIM, was a central part of the US-Algerian disinformation operation in the GWOT. Atallah would therefore have been aware of Iyad’s relationship with Algeria’s secret services, which, at present, are once again under the control of General Aït Ouarabi (aka ‘Hassan’), who had been in charge of provisioning Mali’s 2012 Islamist insurgency with weaponry and other logistics; for which he had been arrested, imprisoned and then released.
Given Atallah’s familiarity with how disinformation had been used to promote the GWOT, it was alarming to read in a post on X by Mali’s military, shortly after Atallah’s visit to Bamako in July (2025), that it had conducted a successful strike in northern Mali against “important AQIM leaders”. The post was disinformation: there was no such strike. As explained in War in the Sahel, Iyad had withdrawn most of JNIM’s forces from northern Mali and was preparing a fuel blockade of Bamako. Nevertheless, Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism and Atallah’s boss, congratulated Mali’s military for a “complex and highly professional operation against some of the World’s most dangerous terrorists.” Gorka, whose bio on Wikipedia makes alarming reading, is probably the most incompetent of the sycophants in the Trump administration, being described by John Bolton “as a conman who should not be in any US government.”
A key date in understanding Trump’s ‘plan’ for the Sahel and Africa’s adjoining regions was 8 February (2026), when high level delegations from Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and the Polisario front, were summoned to meet for secret talks at the US residency in Madrid, overseen by Massad Boulos accompanied by Michael Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, and the personal envoy of the UN Secretary-General for Western Sahara, Staffan de Mistura.
Sis days before the Madrid meeting, Nick Checker, the Acting US State Department’s head of its Bureau of African Affairs, was sent to Bamako to reconfirm Atallah’s message to the Malian junta, namely that the US now “respected Mali’s sovereignty”, was charting a “new course in relations” and moving on from “past policy missteps”. Checker’s visit was intended to facilitate a new intelligence deal with Mali that would permit American drones to monitor terrorist networks, particularly JNIM. Checker also confirmed that US sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on Malian officials associated with Russian mercenaries were lifted. Notably absent from Checker’s message was any reference to the hitherto longstanding American concern for democracy and human rights. The Trump administration was making it plain to Mali’s junta and its AES partners that the US was no longer concerned by their rejection of the European-style constitutional model of elected civilian government. As Boulos, had told France’s Le Monde newspaper the previous year: “Democracy is always appreciated, but our policy is not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. People are free to choose whatever system is appropriate for them.” Checker also reiterated Atallah’s message that although the Trump White House was quite relaxed about Moscow’s military involvement in Mali, the US now wanted its own security partnership with Mali, rather than leaving the field solely to Russia.
The framework for the Madrid discussions was Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara. At Madrid, Algeria finally caved in to US pressure to accept Morocco’s autonomy plan. The pressure had been growing on Algeria since December 2020, when President Donald Trump, during his first term in office, accepted Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco formalising diplomatic ties with Israel. Since 31 October 2025, when the UN codified a major change in its approach to the conflict, the resolution of the Western Sahara issue had been a top priority for the US. UN Resolution 2797 explicitly referenced Morocco’s autonomy plan as the basis for negotiations and ruled out the obsolete and unfeasible referendum model, which had long been advocated by Algeria and the Polisario.
This international realignment was reinforced by the growing number of influential states now openly supporting Morocco’s autonomy proposal for Western Sahara. Meanwhile, Algeria’s foreign-policy posture had become increasingly weakened. Aside from its failure to secure entry into BRICS, Algeria’s relations with key regional actors, including France, Spain, and the Sahel’s AES bloc, had deteriorated, leaving Algeria diplomatically isolated both in the Mediterranean and across Africa. Even within the Arab world, Algeria’s voice had become markedly inaudible.
The outstanding question about the Madrid meeting was how Boulos secured Algeria’s agreement to the Moroccan proposal. Sources close to Algeria’s intelligence and diplomatic services, described to me how the US ‘blackmailed’ Algeria into accepting the agreement, firstly by threatening to sanction Algeria for its purchase of Russian arms and secondly by threatening to designate the Polisario as a terrorist organisation.
However, the Madrid meeting was not entirely negative for Algeria. In the context of the Trump administration’s plan for the wider region, there were potentially positive gains for Algeria from the role that Algeria was expected to play in Trump’s plan.
Trump’s ‘big picture’, as explained by the above-mentioned sources, had four components. The first, and what appears to be Trump’s ‘big vision’ for this part of Africa, is to control the region’s energy – hydrocarbons – which are located mainly in Nigeria, Algeria and Libya. Control of these resources would enable Trump to further isolate China from global energy sources. Although Africa contributes scarcely more than 10 percent of China’s oil sourcing, with Angola making up about half of that, Trump evidently believes his ‘victories’ in Venezuela and Iran, will make China turn more to Nigeria, Algeria and Libya.
The second component of Trump’s ‘big picture’ is to create a US-aligned North Africa ‘entity’ or ‘bloc’ (Morocco-Algeria-Tunisia-Libya and Egypt) that could, in the words of my Algerian sources, “attack” or “undermine Europe from underneath”. Given Trump’s professed irritation with Europe, such a sentiment is understandable. However, my sources were unable to elaborate on how Trump envisaged “attacking” Europe. Although Europe imports a considerable amount of natural gas from Algeria, this is exported mostly through pipelines which are running at close to full capacity and whose closure would be an absurdity for multiple reasons, not least the financial ruination of Algeria.
The third and fourth components of Trump’s ‘plan’ for the region relate to his prospective intervention in the Sahel and how he envisages Algeria’s assistance in that intervention. The messaging from the Trump administration to the AES, especially Mali, as expressed through the visits and communications by Trump’s many emissaries, indicated that Trump is preparing to intervene in the Sahel on the pretext of aiding the AES juntas in their fight against what Sebastian Gorka called the “world’s most dangerous terrorists.”
The US and Algeria are in broad agreement over the Sahel situation in that they both want the AES bloc broken up. The US wants Algeria to assist by prising Niger away from Mali and Burkina Faso. In particular, they want Assimi Goïta and his junta ‘disempowered’ and ‘foreign soldiers’ – the Russians – removed from Algeria’s border area.
Within six days of the Madrid meeting, Algeria had made multiple overtures to Niger, such as restoring diplomatic relations, announcing the start of the construction of the Niger section of the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline (TSGP), and offering several aid packages.
In the same week, as part of Trump’s ‘big picture’ strategy, and possibly on Boulos’s advice to strengthen US ties with the Nigerian government, the US, in a major policy shift, began deploying 200 troops to Nigeria to train and advise local forces in their battle against Islamist militants. The first wave of some 100 soldiers arrived in Nigeria’s Bauchi State on 16 February.
The importance of this operation and Trump’s earlier announcements on providing military aid to Nigeria, was not the number of soldiers deployed, but rather the strategic signal coming from Washington. As in the Sahel’s three AES states, the Trump administration was signalling that it was not willing to lose influence in West Africa’s main Atlantic hub at a time of open global competition between the US, Russia and China. As with the JNIM and ISGS in the Sahel, Boko Haram and the Islamic State were providing the pretext for Washington’s operations in Nigeria.
Further consolidating this ‘big picture’ view of Trump’s control over North and West Africa’s energy was the news that Libya was edging towards a power-sharing agreement after the rival parliaments in Tripoli and Benghazi agreed on 11 April to approve a unified budget, the first since the 2014 civil war. It followed months of talks initiated by Massad Boulos and a budget deal worth some $30 billion that may pave the way for the return of US oil companies.
However, whatever plans Washington may have been preparing for the Western Sahara, Nigeria and the Sahel, they were interrupted on 27 February by Trump’s order to proceed with his war on Iran.
Between 27 February and 25 April, I discussed the Sahel situation with my Algerian and FLA sources on possible ‘post-Madrid’ developments, especially on what moves Iyad ag Ghali and JNIM might be planning in Mali. Those discussions go beyond the scope of this article, except to say that with hindsight, it is evident that JNIM and the FLA, as I had been suspecting, had agreed on how they would coordinate attacks on Assimi Goïta’s junta.
If and when Trump extricates himself from Iran, will he still have the Sahel in his sights, especially after JNIM’s show of force on 25 April? If he does, it could take him into an even greater quagmire than France found itself. Moreover, Trump’s messaging to the junta leaders has made it clear that there is no place in his plan for democracy or human rights. Indeed, if a Trump solution to the Sahel’s ‘terrorist’ problems is unleashed on the region, the Sahel’s long-suffering communities might find themselves being taken from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.
(Featured Image: “Sudan Humanitarian Donor Fund” by af-press is marked with CC0 1.0.)
