The long-expected move effectively marks a new regional gain for Russia, which has ramped up its focus on Africa and backed military regimes in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso.
Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell accepted the call to remove troops in a meeting in Washington with the prime minister of the junta, Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, US officials told AFP on condition of anonymity.
It was a small thing, really, but one of those small things that feels like a sign of something much bigger.
This week, the military junta that rules the African country of Niger announced the revocation of its military agreement with the United States, and the coming expulsion of U.S. troops based in the country. The country’s leadership also announced its turn to Russia. The move followed a disastrous visit by American officials, who arrived to lecture the hard men who led last summer’s coup about the need to restore democracy, and to stop talking to Iran about providing it uranium.
This story will make Justin cry.
The leaders of a coup in Niger have defied a threat imposed by regional powers to relinquish control or face possible military action and have instead asked Russia’s Wagner mercenary group to help them cling to power.
Mutineer soldiers had until Sunday night to return President Bazoum to power or face the consequences decided by west Africa’s regional bloc whose defence chiefs have drawn up a plan to use force.
We spent millions training Nigers armed forces but no worries Joly is on the case.
In a sign of growing hostility towards the West since the coup in Niger, a businessman proudly shows off his outfit in the colours of the Russian flag in the traditional heartland of deposed President Mohamed Bazoum.
Since the coup, there has been a war of words between the military and the West.
Mr Bazoum was a staunch ally of the West in the fight against militant Islamists, and was a strong economic partner as well.
Niger hosts a French military base and is the world’s seventh biggest producer of uranium. The fuel is vital for nuclear power with a quarter of it going to Europe, especially former colonial power France.
The Biden regime does not enjoy widespread support for the Ukraine intervention or for it’s desire to isolate China.
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Germany and France do not share a desire to isolate China which is considered an important trading partner.
In Italy Meloni has yet to withdraw the state from China’s Belt & Road Initiative.
Niger coup casts doubt on Canada’s African strategy of spending millions on military training, development
For a decade, Canada has pursued a quiet campaign to stabilize the fragile West African country of Niger, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on development and security projects to defend an impoverished democracy surrounded by autocratic regimes and Islamist militias.
Today, those expensive efforts are in jeopardy. A coup in Niger has deposed the Western-backed president, Mohamed Bazoum. This has left the country in the hands of military leaders who seem to have abandoned the democratic gospel the Canadians were preaching.
Another Trudeau Triumph. Seems to me that a lot of white people are very protective of their “very important jobs” which involve traipsing about Africa raining cash on the locals to no evident benefit.
It’s sex trafficking. In Islam, prostitution and sex outside marriage are sins … it’s legitimate from a traditional and religious-legal perspective – Dr Benedetta Rossi
Al-Husseina Amadou never forgets the day she was sold. Like her parents, she was born into slavery in southern Niger. Forty-five years ago, when she was 15, a wealthy businessman from across the border in Nigeria arrived and bought her from her family’s master as a “fifth wife” or wahaya.
“My parents had no say,” she recalls. “I was just a girl and he bought me like a chicken in the market. When I left with him, I was crying with my mother.”
For 15 years Amadou lived with her “husband” in northern Nigeria, cooking and cleaning for his four “official” wives, whom he had married in accordance with Islamic law, and their children, while also working in their fields and tending their livestock.
