(I don't know if that tagged the individual who was asking properly)
revolut1917
joined 4 days ago
@Lemmygradwontallowme I'm unable to reply in the original thread bc it's closed now, but since you asked, I mainly follow the Sahel conflict through a Marxist journalist/writer on twitter who I've known for a while and who has a few sources in the region. https://x.com/RashmanTheHorse
JNIM is a merger of several groups including Al Quaeda, emerging out of the Mali conflict which itself was a result of the Libyan civil war in many ways. They don't get along with IS (who have a smaller but significant presence in the region) and fight with them at times. There's no western backing for JNIM and France was directly involved in fighting them until the coups of recent years. They're a frighteningly effective organisation, a proto-state spanning several countries. Reminiscent of ISIS in the early 2010s.
Not really other than in the sense that this insurgency is a long term result of the chaos in Libya and subsequently Mali. AFRICOM doesn't really benefit from JNIM seizing control of a large swathe of the Sahel, neither do France's remaining satellites in West Africa. The fact is that JNIM is a politically intelligent and effective organisation that does a lot to ingratiate itself with local people. They have established social programs in the regions they hold. After decades of rural people being ignored and actively impoverished by the central govts, this is a powerful point of attraction, and Traore's attempts to reverse this trend are coming too late and too little (Mali and Niger's juntas aren't doing much at all).
I think that what would more likely happen is that the US gets directly involved in fighting the insurgencies alongside the AES, which have been more open to US co-operation than most realise (the anti-imperialist sentiment there is more anti-French specifically, finding the outright racism and outdated attitudes of the French harder to deal with). In a year or two I could see the insurgencies toppling a government and that precipitating a deal where the US supplies direct assistance in exchange for some concessions, maybe getting the Russians out of the region, maybe economic concessions. That's just my own view ofc.
the mainstream US "political parties" aren't really political parties in any way that most of the rest of the world would recognise tbh. more like caucuses of one party.
The British libs go really feral about anyone not supporting Ukraine sufficiently for their liking. It's like a crime in their eyes to even suggest that we shouldn't "help Ukraine defend itself" by sending them offensive weaponry capable of hitting Vladivostok. However the jingoism and opinion-policing around Ukraine has lessened dramatically amongst socialists since the heady days of 2022/23 and since the genocide in Palestine has made it very obvious that few who claim to care about "Russia killing civilians" actually give a fuck about that. I think it'll be hard to make any smears like that stick at this point.
Are we so devolved that 25 minutes is too much?
25 min video could be a 5 min article, that's the issue.
unfortunately a lot of people are too soupy-brained to consume media that isn't in video format so they probably get a lot more visibility doing videos and not articles (despite the latter clearly being a better medium for news)
Situation continues to worsen in Burkina Faso https://x.com/WerbCharlie/status/1949527898387620017
🇧🇫|#BurkinaFaso: JNIM fighters seemingly entered the centre of Pibaoré earlier today, with footage showing them posing with and desecrating an AES roundabout. These new landmarks are inadvertently becoming a way for the group to show it has successfully overran an urban area.
it's ridiculously easy to bypass. I don't know what they were hoping to achieve with this implementation. it's not like they couldn't have done it so that you'd actually need ID rather than just a photo of someone who the computer thinks looks old enough. then again, this is the government that wanted to "ban encryption" a few years ago so I'm not surprised they're this incompetent.
not really entitlement i just think articles are generally superior for deep dive news.