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France urges Europeans to help crush Islamist threat in Sahel


France’s defence minister has issued a call to EU allies to join the war against Islamist groups in the Sahel amid growing concern that the six-year-old French military campaign is failing to eradicate the threat of insurgencies in Africa.

Speaking in her office in Paris, Florence Parly said the 4,500-strong Operation Barkhane was facing the “very difficult challenge” of asymmetric war in Mali and its neighbours in the scrub and desert of the Sahel, despite help from US intelligence and logistical and military contributions from the UK, Spain, Estonia and Denmark.

She said the Sahel operation was crucial to EU security, by eliminating a haven for terrorist organisations. Ms Parly said EU countries should help train national armies and send special forces to help Mali in what she said would be “a long haul”.

“In this war nothing is obvious, it’s an asymmetric war,” Ms Parly told the Financial Times in an interview. “It’s a war that combines the struggle against terrorism with local situations of ancestral conflicts or tensions between communities.”

The French-led military campaign in the Sahel has become bloodier in recent months, despite periodic announcements of successful campaigns to eliminate jihadist leaders and seizures of weapons. Sergeant Ronan Pointeau this month became the 28th French soldier to die in the region since former president François Hollande decided to send troops to free Timbuktu from Islamist extremists in January 2013. In two incidents this month, 37 people died in an attack on buses carrying workers to a gold mine in Burkina Faso and Isis killed over 50 at a Malian military base.

Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) soldiers drive along women and children during the Operation Barkhane in Ndaki, Mali, July 29, 2019. Picture taken July 29, 2019. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier - RC1AB20EB590
Large swaths of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which were flooded with arms after the fall of Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi in 2011, are now ungoverned © Reuters

Asked whether France was stuck in a military quagmire, the 56-year-old minister said: “When people say the French are getting bogged down or the Europeans are getting bogged down, by what criteria is this diagnosis being made, unless it’s based on what happened last week? One will always find reasons to say there are setbacks. But setbacks are not defeats.”

She emphasised that after Isis was defeated in Syria, the Sahel operation sought to prevent “the reconstitution at the gates of Europe of a veritable refuge for these terrorist organisations”.

Ms Parly, who was appointed by President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, said Europeans needed to learn to act “when crises arise that directly threaten European interests”.

European defence co-operation was “a work in progress”, she said, stressing the importance of Mr Macron’s year-old European Intervention Initiative, designed to unify the armed forces of 14 countries, which allows “à la carte” contributions outside the ambit of Nato or the EU.

“We expect from this a greater capacity of the Europeans to take charge of security questions without this contradicting the commitments of those countries that are members of the Atlantic alliance,” Ms Parly said.

Mr Macron angered some of his western allies two weeks ago when he warned that Nato was suffering “brain death”.

France is on track to increase its defence spending by 2025 to the 2 per cent of gross domestic product threshold set for Nato members, Ms Parly said. But analysts say Paris remains hamstrung by the less vigorous financial efforts of its EU neighbours, including Germany.

Ms Parly said: “There are the budgetary questions — the means — but at least as important in our eyes is the contribution of the Europeans to operations, to the management of crises. It would not be right to spend the 2 per cent without having actually done anything with the armed forces just at the moment when crises require a response.”

Ms Parly said everything was being done to limit the impact of Brexit on Franco-British defence and security co-operation, with Paris insisting that a common strategic culture in Europe should be developed together with the UK regardless of its EU membership.

The armed forces of the UK and France have worked together for more than a century, the two countries have joint weapons development programmes and their new joint expeditionary force is set to be declared fully operational next year, while Boris Johnson has boasted of the UK contribution of Chinook helicopters to the war in the Sahel.



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