Just this weekend, France said its troops had killed 40 jihadists in Burkina Faso, including individuals believed to be behind three improvised bomb attacks in northern Benin that killed nine people including one French national.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

European governments fear that shifting relationships with the region’s rulers risk leaving a vacuum for movements tied to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group.<\/p>\n

As well as Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea Bissau have been hit by recent military coups.<\/p>\n

In Mali, the government failed to commit resources to re-impose its authority on areas that had been cleared of jihadists by French troops, and the armed forces remain weak despite years of effort to train them up.<\/p>\n

“It will be important to learn the lessons from the Sahel” if the action expands to Gulf of Guinea countries, said Bakary Sambe of the Timbuktu Institute thinktank.<\/p>\n

dab-dla-ah\/tgb\/adp\/sjw\/ri<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

French President Emmanuel Macron this week will announce that French troops will be withdrawn from Mali and redeployed elsewhere in the Sahel following a breakdown in ties with the country’s military regime, concurring sources say.   Several security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that Macron’s announcement to end the nine-year French mission in Mali will coincide with a European Union-African Union summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday. France initially deployed troops in 2013 to beat back advancing jihadist fighters in northern Mali. But the extremists regrouped and in 2015 moved into central Mali, an ethnic powder-keg, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[544,562],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-yeswecantv-news"],"yoast_head":"\n