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| - France and its allies in the Sahel meet in Chad on Monday to discuss the region's relentless jihadist insurgency. Fighting in the vast semi-arid Sahel has raged since 2012, when jihadists first captured swathes of northern Mali. They have since spilled into central Mali and neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, killing thousands, inflaming ethnic tensions and displacing more than two million people. Despite thousands of foreign troops and years of diplomacy, the conflict appears as intractable as ever. In January, 105 people were slaughtered in two villages in western Niger in the deadliest single attack on civilians since the conflict began. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso are among the poorest nations in the world, and government authority in many rural areas is often in name only. Jihadists have benefitted from a sense of abandonment among rural populations and exploit pre-existing tensions between ethnic groups. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project, an NGO that records statistics on political violence, said 2,248 civilians were killed in the central Sahel in 2020 -- 400 more than the previous year. The UN said last month that more than two million people have now been displaced. Fears are growing that jihadist groups are poised to spread beyond the central Sahel. In June, jihadists attacked a border checkpoint in northern Ivory Coast and killed 14 soldiers, raising the prospects of such a spillover. French intelligence also recently released footage of a meeting between Al-Qaeda commanders in the Sahel where they mentioned plans to expand into coastal countries on the Gulf of Guinea. The UN Security Council warned in a report in February that Al-Qaeda-aligned militants had "established themselves in Senegal". Jean-Herve Jezequel, the Sahel director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), says militarisation of Sahel countries is now "very difficult" to curb. Civilian self-defence groups have sprung up alongside jihadist outfits across the region. Some of these groups are small and local. But others, such as Burkina Faso's Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, are large auxiliary organisations for the conventional armed forces. In central Mali, an ethnic Dogon militia named Dan Nan Ambassagou controls swathes of territory, with officials in the capital Bamako fearing the group is rivalling the army. These two organisations fill a "glaring state vacuum," said a UN official in Mali, speaking on condition of anonymity. Sahel armies are no longer suffering the huge casualties of a few years ago, and the French government believes they are becoming more self-reliant despite persistent weakness. On the political front, Burkina Faso successfully held elections last year. And a run-off vote to pick the president of Niger takes place this month. In Mali, army officers deposed president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in a coup in August, after weeks of protests over perceived corruption and the long-running jihadist conflict. The West African state's interim government has pledged to stage fresh elections within about a year. Despite this, Sahel states nevertheless remain fragile. Huge tracts of Mali lie outside of government control: Only 9 percent of civil-servant positions in the north and centre of the country are filled, for example. That figure is the lowest since 2015, according to the UN. "The security crisis is simply the symptom of a deeper crisis of state governance," said Jezequel. ah/lal/eml/ri
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