Editorial Note: Professor Jeremy Keenan is a social anthropologist, a recognised authority on the Sahara-Sahel and the most widely published scholar on the region, with over 300 publications to his name, including 14 books, with a further 5 in preparation, of which 14 are on the Sahara. Over the years he has advised many international bodies on the political and security situation in the Sahara-Sahel region including the United Nations, the European Commission, NATO, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and its Defence Ministry; the US State Department, as well as several European governments, international NGOs, and several multinational companies and broadcasting networks.
He recently spoke with Propaganda in Focus regarding his forthcoming (2026) books, The Global War on Terror in the Sahara and War in the Sahel, which provide a 2-volume, c.800-page analysis of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) in North, West and Sahelian Africa since 2001.
Q. When we spoke recently, you mentioned that you had six manuscripts ready for publication, all focusing on ‘state crime’ with the main ones being on the GWOT. Could you tell us what they are.
There are two large volumes, about 800 pages altogether, on the GWOT in Africa over the last 25 years and its consequences for the countries and people affected. When I say ‘Africa’, I am referring specifically to North Africa, with Algeria being the main ally of the US in launching the GWOT into the continent. The GWOT was also launched into the Sahel countries of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad, from where it is now spreading increasingly into West Africa. The two volumes are entitled: The War on Terror in the Sahara and War in the Sahel.
The other four are entitled: The rise of the Tashliks; Mali’s Genocide: Dying for Change: apartheid revisited; and a memoir of my fieldwork in Africa, mostly on the GWOT. ‘Tashlik’ is a derogatory Tuareg term for Arab traffickers. The book is a ‘spin-off’ from the first two. It explains how the Algerian army, or at least its generals (who run a ‘mafia state’), have instrumentalised ‘terrorism’ to create a ‘narco-terrorism empire’, as local people call it, in the central Sahara.
Mali’s Genocide was written synchronously with Mali’s perpetration of a genocide against Mali’s Tuareg, starting in late-2023 under the guise of ‘counterterrorism’. The genocide was committed by the Malian army and its Russian Wagner group allies on the orders of Mali’s military ruler, Assimi Goïta, to “kill all ‘white-skinned’ (i.e. Tuareg and Arabs) people” in northern Mali. The genocide is a direct consequence of the GWOT in Africa. First published online in 2025 but then taken down for submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC), it is being republished in early 2026.
Q. The first book you mention, The War on Terror in the Sahara, sounds very similar to the paper you gave at the Seville WOCMES (World Congresses for Middle Eastern Studies) Conference in July 2018. Why has that paper taken so long to be published in book form and why have you expanded it into two volumes?
The aim of the Seville paper – “Ungoverned spaces – Propaganda in the GWOT’s ‘second front’: the Sahara Sahel case.” – was to answer a simple question: Why had the Iraq War, launched synchronously with a ‘second front’ in the Sahara-Sahel in 2003, been so quickly exposed as based on propaganda, while the official version of the Sahara-Sahel front, also based on disinformation, has remained unchallenged, except by me?
That paper, along with others in our panel, was to have been published in the International Journal of contemporary Iraqi Studies. When that journal folded, I submitted the paper to Critical Studies on Terrorism, where it was rejected by Richard Jackson, probably because it exposed the ‘dirty tricks’ behind the US’ GWOT. I then submitted it to State Crime (The Journal of the International State Crime Initiative – ISCI), which requested more detailed information, until it grew to some 20,000 words to be published in two parts. At that point, my university was planning a State Crime book series with Routledge, who, on realising that my proposed book covered so much material, suggested two volumes. However, Routledge then fell into long ‘silences’ before failing to communicate altogether, presumably not wishing to publish such controversial material. That led to the decision to ‘self-publish’, which, in turn, ran into two scams and hacks, as if someone was wanting to prevent publication. Hence, the gestation period of over seven years.
Q. Are the two volumes on the GWOT now complete and what sort of information do they contain? Also, what divides the two volumes, chronologically, geographically and thematically?
The War on Terror in the Sahara is completed. War in the Sahel should be completed in January. Given my original question of why the ‘official’ version of the GWOT in the Sahara-Sahel had remained unchallenged, I intended to write what I hoped would be the ‘definitive’ account of the GWOT in these parts Africa. I had tried to do that with two earlier books: The Dark Sahara (2009) and The Dying Sahara (2013). However, since the second of those was published in 2013, much more evidence has come to light. Moreover, since 2012, the GWOT spread into the Sahel region of Africa with horrific consequences.
The two volumes divide themselves very conveniently chronologically, geographically and thematically into two phases, one might call them halves, of the GWOT. The War in the Sahel, which began in 2013, and is still expanding, was rooted in the first decade of the GWOT. The first part of the GWOT, which is covered by The War on Terror in the Sahara, started in 2003 and ends around 2012. This first decade of the GWOT was heavily Algerian-oriented and was enabled by the Pentagon’s alliance with Algeria’s secret military intelligence service: the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS). This was done through a criminal conspiracy between Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, notably his ‘Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group’, or P2OG as it was known, and the DRS. This first decade of the GWOT consisted almost entirely of ‘false-flag’ operations, enshrined in a false narrative of the War on Terror in the Sahara, with all the operations, some of which never even took place and were simply imagined, being set deep in the Sahara. Very few people were killed in this phase; a maximum of 500 and possibly as few as 200.
This fabricated narrative served to justify the instrumentalisation of ‘terrorism’ to fulfil very specific US interests. The first was access to strategic African resources, namely oil, to overcome America’s developing energy crisis, the subject of the infamous Cheney Report of 2001. As that crisis was resolved, thanks to the exploitation of the US’ domestic shale oil and gas resources, the Pentagon was faced with some uniquely American military turf wars, the solution to which was seen by the Pentagon in the creation of a new, independent military command for Africa, US AFRICOM. However, to overcome strong political resistance from Congress, which saw AFRICOM as unnecessary, the Pentagon, with the complicity of several PNAC (Project for a New American Century) elements in the Bush Administration, reinvigorated the GWOT in the Sahara-Sahel with another series of false-flag operations, beginning in 2006, to justify to Congress the need for the new Command.
With AFRICOM’s creation in October 2007 and its activation 12 months later, the GWOT in this part of the world might have been put to bed. After all, the US’ energy crisis was resolved; AFRICOM was established and the Bush administration was about to hand the baton to Barack Obama, who’s transitional team had been thoroughly briefed, through a number of telephone conversations with me, on the duplicitous activities of the Bush administration in justifying its GWOT, to the point that Obama tried – unsuccessfully – to rid his administration of the use of the term.
Volume I – The War on Terror in the Sahara – provides detailed evidence of how the first decade of the GWOT (2003-2012) was based entirely on false-flag operations and associated disinformation.
However, two things, over which Obama, at least initially, had little control, interfered with whatever plans he may have had to move on from the GWOT. One was an extraordinary plot, conjured up by the US Justice Department and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), to justify its own existence and interests by further globalising the GWOT by expanding it into a global war against ‘narco-terrorism’. This involved trying to prove, in a US federal court, that drug trafficking and terrorism, in the form of Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and Al Qaeda, were two sides of the same coin. The second was the Arab Spring of 2011 and the associated ‘NATO’ (US, UK and France) attempt to oust Libya’s Colonel Mouamar Gadhafi.
On 16 December 2009, three Malian men – ‘innocents abroad’ – attended a meeting at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Accra, Ghana. Instead of the friendly meeting they were expecting, they were seized, handcuffed, taken to a nearby airstrip and bundled into a jet chartered by the US government. 17 hours later, they were in New York, where they were arraigned on a little understood charge that had never been used by the US Justice system and detained in lower Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. It was one of the clumsiest ‘sting’ operations the US administration had ever enacted.
The three ‘innocents’ remained incarcerated in New York for over two years, with the delay probably attributable to the difficulties faced by the DEA in fabricating enough ‘evidence’, much of which was demolished by the defence lawyers and thrown out by the judge before even reaching the courtroom.
The first three chapters of Volume II, War in the Sahel, describe the felonious activities of the Justice Department and DEA and how their clumsy sting operation was finally exposed for all to see.
By the time the Manhattan court case in early 2012 had revealed how the US Justice Department and DEA had used the GWOT propaganda in their failed attempt to prove the existence of a global ‘narco-terrorism’ network, the consequences of ‘NATO’s’ ousting of Mouamar Gadhafi were already unfolding in the three Malians’ hometown of Gao in northern Mali.
At this point, one needs to understand the situation around Gao in 2012 and the migrations of Tuareg from the Sahel to Libya and their return to Mali (and Niger) in late-2011.
In 1973 and 1984, the Sahel was hit by severe droughts that forced many Tuareg to migrate to Libya in search of work, only for Gadhafi to draft them into his foreign legion and send them to fight in Syria and Chad. With Gadhafi’s gruesome assassination in October 2011, thousands of these Tuareg were forced by the victorious Libyan ‘rebels’ to leave Libya and return to the Sahel: Mali and Niger. However, the Tuareg in both Niger and Mali had already been suffering greatly at the hands of their own rulers over the preceding few years, as the governments of both countries sought more financial and military largesse from Washington for assisting Washington in its GWOT. This assistance took the form of the Malian and Nigerien armies harassing Tuareg communities and provoking them into taking up arms, to demonstrate to Washington that there really were ‘terrorists’ in the Sahel, as US propaganda had been trumpeting since 2003 as justification for launching the GWOT into those remote corners of Africa.
Many years later, around 2016, Wikileaks discovered hundreds of cables, sent by US diplomats stationed in Bamako (Mali) to the State Department in Washington, in which they informed the State Department of the atrocities being committed by the Malian and Nigerien governments against the Tuareg. However, the US State Department was using a filter that discarded all cables referring to the plight of the Tuareg. The result was that the information transmitted by the State Department to the Pentagon provided the Pentagon only with information that reinforced its fabricated narrative and propaganda about ‘thousands’ of Al Qaeda terrorists fleeing Afghanistan and crossing through the Sahel countries to join up with Algerian terrorists in North Africa and thereby threaten Europe. This narrative was false: a figment of the Pentagon’s imagination. However, it enabled the Pentagon’s Generals, such as Air Force General Charles Wald, to describe the Sahara as “a swamp that had to be drained”.
The second Volume II – War in the Sahel – starts chronologically in 2012-2013, picking up the GWOT as the Tuareg returnees from Libya arrive back Mali in late 2011, and as the GWOT’s geographical centre of gravity, following the overthrow of Gadhafi, shifts southwards into the Sahel.
When the Malian Tuareg returned from Libya heavily armed and angry at the fate of Gadhafi, they met up and joined forces with the few remaining ‘rebel’ Tuareg who had been suffering at the hands of Mali’s army that had been fighting the Pentagon’s supposed Al Qaeda terrorists hiding out in the Sahara, but who, in reality, were innocent Tuareg civilians. The local Tuareg rebels and the Tuareg refugees from Gadhafi’s Libya joined together to form the Mouvement National pour la libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) – (Azawad being the Tuareg name for northern Mali) and set out at the start of 2012 to free Azawad from Malian rule and create their own independent state of Azawad.
However, the main reason for this southwards shift of the GWOT was because the creation of the MNLA posed a serious threat to Algeria. Algeria’s DRS, the Algerian agency that had been managing the many false-flag operations in the Sahara-Sahel on Washington’s behalf, realised that a Tuareg secessionist movement in Mali would ignite political unrest amongst Algeria’s own Tuareg population.
The DRS’s plan to rid itself of the MNLA threat was to create two more armed Islamist movements, Ansar al-Dine and the Mouvement pour l’Unification et le Jihad en Afrique de l’Ouest (MUJAO), alongside Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which it had already fully infiltrated and effectively controlled, and send all three groups as an armed Islamist insurgency into northern Mali, ostensibly to fight alongside the MNLA but with the objective of weakening and destroying the MNLA as a credible political and military force. By the end of 2012, the Islamists, backed covertly by Algeria’s DRS, had sidelined the MNLA, taken over northern Mali, including the town of Gao, the home of the three ‘innocents’ incarcerated in New York, and were threatening the capital, Bamako, in the south
Chapter 4 of volume II – War in the Sahel – switches from the Manhattan courtroom and the three ‘innocents’ from Gao, to the start of the second phase or ‘half’ of the GWOT, as the GWOT was about to envelop the Sahel. The start of this ‘war’ is very precise: 11 January 2013. That was the day on which French military forces, at the request of the Mali government, arrived in Mali to drive the Islamists out of the country.
This second volume records the deepening catastrophe from 2013 to the present, as the GWOT, now located almost exclusively in the Sahel, was quickly transformed from what had been an ideological war based on propaganda and a largely imagined narrative, into a ‘real’ region-wide conflagration in which at least 25,000 people, mostly civilians, have now been killed, with millions displaced.
Thematically, the volume explains how the roots of the War in the Sahel were laid by the duplicitous operations of the first decade of Washington’s GWOT in the Sahara-Sahel, only for the US, having taken this huge region of Africa to the brink of increasingly inchoate conflict, insecurity and political instability, to wash its hands of the problem and hand over responsibility – no doubt with some relief – to France, as the dominant foreign power in the region.
Volume II covers several key issues about ‘jihadism’ and ‘terrorism’. For example, it explains the rise and geographical expansion of jihadism across the Sahara and into West Africa, more or less as a direct corollary of France’s military failure: a failure derived from France’s inexplicably poor intelligence and its insistence on adopting America’s military counterterrorism playbook. This is a playbook which leads to the destruction of local communities; the generation of inter-community strife, displacement and impoverishment; thereby creating an increasingly fertile terrain for the recruitment of ‘jihadists’ to fight the ‘infidel’. Numbering a few hundred in 2013, the two main jihadist groups in the Sahel (excluding Boko Haram) now comprise some 10,000 well-equipped fighters.
Volume II also documents and explains the rise in anti-French sentiment as France’s failed military strategy, combined with its neo-colonial Françafrique policy, has nurtured anti-colonial movements in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso (known as the ‘coup bloc’), which have led to a series of coup d’états and military juntas taking power in these and adjoining countries, forcing all French and UN peacekeeping forces to withdraw from the region by late 2023, to be replaced by Russia’s Wagner group mercenaries, now rebranded as the Kremlin’s Africa Corps.
The volume also documents how the region, with the Russians having replaced France and the UN, not as ‘peacekeepers’ but as the juntas’ ‘protectors’ in a proxy Cold War scenario, now finds itself ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’. The rate of civilian killings, mostly through unbelievable acts of bestiality, including cannibalism and the genocide of Mali’s Tuareg, has virtually doubled since the Russians arrived on the scene in late 2021. Far from fighting terrorism, the Russians are now regarded by local communities as the terrorists. As local communities turn increasingly to the jihadists for protection, so the jihadists are increasingly turning their guns on the Sahel’s military rulers, their out-of-control armies and their Russian allies.
The volume concludes with an assessment of the irony whereby America’s GWOT has transformed the countries with which it had once allied itself in one of this century’s greatest crimes – the GWOT, into Russian satellites. This brings us to the question of which way the US will move, if at all, from its current ambivalence towards the continent and especially towards the Sahara-Sahel region.
These two volumes will remind older hands in Washington how the Bush administration’s launch in 2003 of a Saharan front in the GWOT has brought the Sahel region of Africa to its current state of crisis. From being a region in which there was no ‘terrorism’ prior to the launch of the GWOT in 2002-3, it was labelled by Reuters in late 2024, citing the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), as the “world’s terrorism hotspot”.
The current US administration has remained silent, offering, when obliged to respond, politically correct platitudes about democracy and human rights. However, with President Trump as the elephant in the room, it is most unlikely that he will acknowledge how the roots of this catastrophe were laid by his Republican predecessor. The question therefore becomes more worrying: will he be inclined to ‘do a Ukraine’ and leave Russia to establish itself as the dominant power in the region and walk away, as is his wont, from what he presumably regards – in his own inimitably erudite language – as another of Africa’s “shitholes?”
- Do you have publication release dates yet?
Details will be available in January. There is a 20-week regulatory ‘cataloguing period’. That means Volume I will be released around 1 May, with Volume II shortly thereafter. A website, provisionally called Jeremy Keenan’s publications, giving details of all these publications, should be up and running in January.
(Featured Image: “Tuareg Men Using Binoculars in the Sahara” by M1key.me is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)
