Thirty-five souls extinguished. An airport besieged. Niger, a nation already teetering on the precipice of chaos, has been dealt another brutal blow.
The jihadist assault on the strategic transit hub of Agadez is not merely a headline from the world’s forgotten quarter: it is a chilling lesson in the fragility of civilisation. We in the West, cocooned in our digital fortresses, avert our eyes. But history, that merciless pedagogue, demands we look.
The fall of Rome was not a single cataclysm but a series of wounds, each deeper than the last. So too is the slow bleed of the Sahel. Agadez is not just a dusty airstrip: it is the linchpin of Western counterterrorism, the staging ground for drones and special forces.
And now it is a morgue. The jihadists understand something our strategic planners seem to have forgotten: that power is not merely a matter of hardware but of will. They are willing to die.
Are we willing to win? The answer, if these past twenty years of fruitless intervention are any guide, is a resounding no. We drone, we train, we declare victory.
And the jihadists adapt. They learn. They wait.
And then they strike, with a precision that mocks our technological hubris. The intellectuals among us will wring their hands about ‘root causes’ and ‘colonial legacies’. Fine.
But let us also admit a simpler truth: that some forces in this world are evil, and they will not be reasoned with. They will not be bribed. They will not be contained.
They must be destroyed. Yet our leaders have lost the stomach for such honesty. They speak of ‘cycles of violence’ as if violence were a meteorological phenomenon, not a choice.
Meanwhile, the bodies pile up in Agadez. This is what decadence looks like. It looks like a civilisation that has forgotten how to defend itself.
The Roman senators, too, debated fine points of law while the barbarians sharpened their axes on the gates. We are no different. The only question is whether we will learn before the next siege reaches our own shores.
