The European Business Council for Africa

Militaries in West Africa’s unstable Sahel region are being outmanoeuvred by tech-savvy militants, with access to new technological advances, Niger’s president Mohamed Bazoum
warned this week.
Among the factors making it hard to keep up are the use of satellite phones, advanced weaponry smuggled from fragile Libya, and the use of motorcycles for increased mobility, he
said, giving militants the upper hand and requiring a new strategy to ‘make the war less
unbalanced’.
His comments are worrying.


Not because of the supposed high tech threat from militants in the Sahel, but because mobile phones and motorcycles are apparently enough to overwhelm the region's militaries.
This says more about the dysfunctional nature of the response to growing jihadist militancy,
than their technological or strategic capabilities.

 

You can read the full report here.