The airport in Niamey, Niger, is not a place one associates with the clamour of civilisation. It is a dusty, sun-baked outpost of international travel, a gateway to the Sahel’s lawless expanse. Yesterday, it became a charnel house.
Thirty-five dead, most of them civilians, cut down in a coordinated attack that bore all the hallmarks of the jihadi insurgency that has turned this region into a graveyard of failed states. The British government, ever prompt when its citizens are in peril, dispatched special forces to extract the handful of UK nationals stranded in the chaos. One cannot help but admire the efficiency, even as one recoils at the necessity.
This is the new normal. In the early 2000s, we spoke of the ‘Arc of Instability’ stretching from North Africa to Central Asia. Now, that arc has become a noose, tightening around the neck of West Africa.
Niger, once a relative oasis of stability in a turbulent neighbourhood, has seen its security collapse under the weight of Boko Haram, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, and a host of militias that thrive on weak governance and abundant weaponry. The airport attack is not an anomaly; it is a symptom. The French withdrawal from Mali, the implosion of the G5 Sahel, and the hollow promises of Western counter-terrorism have left a vacuum.
Into that vacuum steps the jihadist, the kidnapper, the trafficker. They do not respect borders or treaties. They respect only power, and power in the Sahel is now measured in bodies.
The British response, commendable as it is, smacks of the old imperial reflex: send in the commandos, whisk away the white faces, and leave the rest to fate. But we cannot pretend that evacuation is a strategy. The blood in Niamey is on the hands of decades of neglect, of treating the Sahel as a secondary theatre in the so-called ‘War on Terror’.
We have outsourced security to local autocrats, flooded the region with drones and cash, and then looked away when the inevitable collapse came. The colonial powers built their empires on extraction, and now they extract their citizens. History has a bitter sense of humour.
Let us not mince words: the massacre at Niger’s airport is a direct consequence of the intellectual and political decadence that has gripped Western foreign policy for a generation. We have convinced ourselves that we can wage war by proxy, that we can kill our way to peace, that the problems of the Sahel are someone else’s to solve. This is the same decadence that saw the Fall of Rome, when the legions were withdrawn and the frontier provinces were left to the mercy of barbarians.
Today’s barbarians do not come from Germania; they come from the desert, and they carry AK-47s and a manifest destiny of their own. The evacuation of British nationals is a tactical success, but a strategic confession. It tells the world that we have given up on the idea of order beyond our shores.
We are retreating to the citadel, leaving the provinces to their fate. The only question is how long the walls will hold. Niamey is a warning.
London, Paris, and Washington would do well to heed it, before the next airport becomes a battlefield closer to home.
