Donors pledge $510 million for West Africa's G5 Sahel force

International donors today pledged 414 million euros ($510 million) to five impoverished countries in West Africa's Sahel region, much of it to fund a new counterterror force.

The 5,000-strong G5 Sahel force for Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger needs around 400 million euros for its mission along mostly desert borders, including near Libya the main jumping-off point for thousands of African migrants bound for Italy.

The amount pledged "goes far beyond our initial expectations," said EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. "It's a tremendous result that allows us to begin putting the force into operation." The pledges came at a summit in Brussels of 32 leaders and 60 delegations meant to show political, development and security support for the five countries.

"The Sahel is one of Europe's frontiers. The Sahel is a shield, a dike that must never burst," said Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou. He reminded the leaders that "security is a global public good."

What killed the promise of Muslim communism?

For a brief moment after the Bolshevik uprisings of 1917, it looked like revolution might be waged across vast swaths of the world under the joint banner of Communism and Islam.

Pan-Islam had emerged in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, with the efforts of Sultan Abdulhamid II to lay claim to the title of caliph among Muslims. New forms of Islamic schooling and associations began to emerge across the Arab world and beyond. From Egypt and Iraq to India and the Indonesian archipelago, Islam became a rallying call against European colonialism and imperialism.

Islam’s mobilizing power attracted Communist activists in the 1910s and 1920s. The Bolsheviks, who lacked organizational infrastructure in the vast Muslim lands of the former Russian empire, allied with Islamic reformers in those areas. They created a special Commissariat for Muslim Affairs under the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, promising to establish a distinctive “Muslim Communism” across the Caucasus and Central Asia. During the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, in what is today Azerbaijan, the Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, a Ukrainian Jew, called for waging a “holy war” against Western imperialism.

But as we now know, Communism and Islam failed to coalesce into a lasting alliance. By the onset of the Cold War, they seemed irrevocably opposed. Differing views about Communism divided Muslims across Asia, Africa and the Middle East in their struggles for independence and emancipation during the second half of the 20th century. An anti-Communist jihad fundamentally remade Afghanistan in the 1980s and helped set the stage for the rise of Al Qaeda and the emergence of a new form of Islamist terrorism.
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Mali attack: Terrorists shouting 'Allahu Akbar' kill 2; 4 assailants killed

Four assailants have been killed by security forces in Mali after an attack, which left at least two people dead, on a tourist resort popular with foreigners close to the capital Bamako, the country's security minister said.

"We have recovered the bodies of two attackers who were killed," Security Minister Salif Traore told journalists, adding that they were "searching for the bodies of two others", without specifying if any more were on the run.

Suspected jihadists crying "Allahu Akbar" stormed the tourist resort on Monday, briefly seizing hostages and leaving at least two people dead.

The assault on the Kangaba Le Campement resort comes after a similar strike less than two years ago on a luxury hotel in Bamako, which lies in the south of the troubled country.

Security forces battled the gunmen at the site, with nearby residents reporting hearing shots while smoke billowed into the air, with at least one building ablaze.

"It is a jihadist attack. Malian special forces intervened and about 20 hostages have been released," Traore told AFP.

"Unfortunately for the moment there are two dead, including a Franco-Gabonese," the minister added.

An official from the security ministry confirmed earlier that Malian special forces, backed up by UN soldiers and troops from a French counter-terrorism force, "have sealed off the area and are in the process of organising operations" against the attackers.
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