Let us begin with a moment of silence for the thirty-five souls who, mere hours ago, boarded the final flight to oblivion at Niamey’s Diori Hamani International Airport. Gunmen, presumably fed up with delays at baggage claim and the extortionate price of a single miniature of Gordon's, decided to stage a spectacularly bloody protest. The result? A tarmac awash with gore, a terminal turned into a charnel house, and the UK’s defence establishment suddenly remembering that the Sahel exists.
Yes, the Sahel. That dusty stretch of Africa where the maps go all blurry and the Foreign Office’s policy is largely to hope no one asks. Our defence planners, no doubt, were knees-deep in a spreadsheet of potential threats to the Surrey stockbroker belt when this little incident came rattling through the teleprinter. ‘Blimey,’ they said, spitting out their single malt. ‘The Sahel. I thought we sorted that out in 2012.’
The attack itself, a masterpiece of logistical coordination one would not expect from a group of men who probably communicate via goat-skin drum, has left Niger’s government looking as useful as a chocolate fireguard. Security forces, caught napping (or perhaps just napping), have since cordoned off the area, but the damage is done. Flights are cancelled. Tourists are stuck. And the local gin supply, already critically low, is now facing a total collapse.
But let us not dwell on the grim specifics. Instead, let us examine the reaction of Her Majesty’s Defence Planners. These are men who have spent decades preparing for the Russian horde to pour through the Fulda Gap. They have contingency plans for a zombie apocalypse and a Welsh uprising. But the Sahel? That’s just where the Mali crisis is, right? And isn’t it a bit hot? And don’t they speak French? The horror, the horror.
The news wires are already buzzing with talk of a ‘review of posture.’ This is civil service code for ‘let’s hire a consultant to tell us what we already know while we panic-buy paperclips.’ The Prime Minister, no doubt, will be offered sage advice from the likes of Lord West, who will emerge from a mothballed yacht to declare that ‘something must be done,’ before disappearing into a cloud of Pimm’s.
Meanwhile, the real question remains: Why do they keep attacking airports? Is it the appeal of tax-free goods? The universal contempt for Ryanair? Or are these gunmen simply trying to win the Olympics of chaos? The score so far: Brussels 32, Istanbul 44, Niamey 35. It is a competition no one wants to win, yet here we are, glued to the leaderboard like it’s the World Cup.
And what of the victims? We will not remember their names, because the media will forget them by the time you finish this sentence. They will become statistics, footnotes in a geopolitical analysis that will be filed and promptly ignored until the next atrocity. But their families will remember. They will curse the gods, the government, and perhaps the man who sold the attackers their Kalashnikovs on the cheap.
In closing, let us raise a glass of warm, airport-bought gin to the follies of man. To the planners who scramble for a map. To the tourists now stranded in a country where ‘safe’ is a relative term. And to the thirty-five who, somewhere in the great departure lounge in the sky, are still waiting for their luggage to arrive.
Yours in gin-soaked despair,
Biff Thistlethwaite
