China Boosts Military Presence in Africa’s Sahel Region

People's Liberation Army soldiers and members of a U.N. peacekeeping unit destined for Darfur in the Sudan practice defense maneuvers at their base in China's central Henan Province on Sept. 15, 2007. PETER PARKS/AFP via Getty Images

JOHANNESBURG—It stretches almost 4,000 miles across the Sahara Desert and spans 10 countries, from the Atlantic Ocean that touches Senegal in West Africa to Port Sudan on the eastern Red Sea.

Its 400 million people are some of the poorest in the world, often assailed by drought, floods, famine, and political instability, with toppled governments and violent extremists making it the most terrorist-infested region on Earth.

Organized crime groups specializing in human trafficking and weapons smuggling thrive in its chaos.

Yet many of the world’s major powers want a piece of the Sahel.

Its countries, which include Cameroon, Mali, and Nigeria, possess immense wealth in natural resources, including oil, gas, gold, and diamonds.

The Sahel is one of the most mineral-rich areas on the planet, where the elements needed to drive the global renewable energy revolution are mined in abundance.

France needs a foothold in the Sahel because it contains former colonies that made it rich and continue to build its economy.

The European Union wants to be in the Sahel to try to stop a flood of migrants, who use routes across the Sahara to reach the Algerian and Moroccan coasts where they board boats to Spain and Italy.

Russian forces are already present in the Sahel, under the guise of the Kremlin’s Africa Corps, earning tens of millions of dollars a month by propping up illegitimate regimes and controlling mines.

The United States wants troops in the Sahel to counter the area’s many extremist organizations affiliated with the al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist groups, the world’s biggest global terrorist networks that have declared jihad on the United States.

Now, a new player is emerging in the region, and it seems to have more reasons than anyone else to want to be there: the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

“Intelligence reports I’ve seen from various African and foreign agencies all travel along the same lines: That China wants to use the Sahel’s diverse terrain to train its forces in tactics applicable to jungles, deserts and mountain ranges, and vast expanses of ocean,” Helmoed Heitman, a South African defense analyst, military strategist, and former officer in the country’s National Defense Force, said.

Guy Martin, an editor at DefenceWeb, a website focused on defense-related matters in Africa, said the Chinese regime’s primary objective in establishing a greater military presence on the continent would be to protect its economic assets, including mines extracting critical minerals, some of which are crucial in weapons such as missile systems, fighter jets, and tanks.

“Don’t forget that the Sahel also contains some of the world’s largest deposits of uranium,” he told The Epoch Times.

Uranium can be used to make nuclear bombs.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping inspects a military honor guard during his official state visit at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, South Africa, on July 24, 2018. Phill Magakoe/AFP/Getty Images

Martin said Beijing also needs to ensure the security of thousands of Chinese workers and businesses in Africa.

Heitman said the Chinese regime wants to use the Sahel as a base from which to sell weapons and ammunition to the entire continent.

It supplanted Russia as the largest exporter of arms to Africa in 2023, according to statistics obtained by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Research by the Italian Institute for International Political Studies found that in 2022 Russia provided more than 40 percent of Africa’s weapons, and the PRC supplied less than 20 percent.

However, Russian arms sales to Africa collapsed to $102 million in 2023 from $315 million in 2022, the study found.

Over the same period, the Chinese regime’s weapons sales to the continent increased by almost the same amount, to $306 million from $103 million.

Paul Nantulya, research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, said Chinese-manufactured weapons—including aircraft, electronic warfare systems, automatic rifles, drones, missiles, and armored vehicles—are flowing into conflict zones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and many other areas.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute report states that at least 21 countries in sub-Saharan Africa received large shipments of Chinese arms between 2019 and 2023.

Nantulya told The Epoch Times that the Chinese regime is using its economic dominance in Africa to “militarize and securitize” its policy there. Africa is China’s largest trade partner, and the Chinese regime has funded many of the continent’s infrastructure builds over the past decade.

This, Nantulya said, is in line with leader Xi Jinping’s pledge in 2017 to transform the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into a “world-class force” by 2030 by equipping it with the combat and power projection capabilities necessary to defend the Chinese regime’s growing global interests and win future wars.

Heitman told The Epoch Times that the Sahel is “rapidly starting to look like the African doorway” into Xi’s vision.

“For decades the only Chinese troops in Africa were U.N. peacekeepers, but now we’re seeing an influx of hardcore fighting battalions who are using the Sahel, and other parts of the continent, to overtly prepare for war,” he said.

“It’s also using the Sahel as a testing ground for new weapons, because it’s very isolated and far away from prying eyes, especially now that America was forced to abandon its spy base in Niger.”

In May 2024, following a coup in July 2023, Niger’s military rulers asked 1,000 U.S. troops to leave the country, and the United States completed the withdrawal in August 2024.

Heitman said: “Niger was America’s main base for monitoring terrorist activity across the Sahel, West Africa and North Africa. Special forces used drones in highly successful missions against groups with allegiance to al-Qaeda and ISIS. Many terrorist cells were destroyed.”

The 2024 Global Terrorism Index described the Sahel as the “epicenter” of violent extremism, saying it accounted for almost half of the 8,352 deaths from terrorism in 2023.

Géraud Byamungu, an analyst at the China–Global South Project based in Johannesburg and Washington, told The Epoch Times that the departure of U.S. soldiers from Niger was the “final nail in the coffin” that opened up the Sahel to the Chinese regime and Russia. For the first time in decades, there is now no official Western security or military presence in the region.

A series of coups swept the Sahel from 2020 to 2023, putting military juntas in charge of countries including Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The juntas ordered thousands of French troops, who had been fighting terrorists, to leave, replacing them with Russian forces.

Chad, Ivory Coast, and Senegal have also asked Paris to withdraw its soldiers and military equipment from their territories.

The Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a military research organization in Arlington, Virginia, said the withdrawal of U.S. and French troops from the Sahel presents a unique opportunity for the Chinese regime to expand its military influence in the region.

The CNA released a report in October 2024 detailing the military and security dimensions of Beijing’s presence in Africa.

The organization, which has access to U.S. intelligence sources, said the PLA maintains a permanent deployed operational presence of roughly 4,100 service members in Africa and its surrounding waters, with 2,000 stationed at its base in Djibouti.

The United States has a force of approximately 4,000 military and civilian personnel at the Camp Lemonnier base in Djibouti.

The CNA concluded that the possibility of Beijing soon increasing its troop numbers significantly in Africa is high.

“Africa has been a testing ground for PRC military and security involvement outside China’s borders,” the authors of the report wrote.

“Since first established in 2017, the PLA base in Djibouti has expanded from a ‘logistics facility’ designed to service rotational deployments to a major logistics base with a dedicated naval pier capable of hosting China’s largest blue-water naval vessels and a deployed PLAN Marine Corps special operations force unit able to support combat missions.”

The CNA said the Chinese regime will likely build more military bases and infrastructure around the continent, including in the Gulf of Guinea on the west coast of Africa, which is a gateway to the Sahel.

“The politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) clearly regards Africa as vitally important to victory if a global war breaks out,” Heitman said.

He said the continent, with its long coastlines and ports giving it easy access to Europe, the Middle East, and supply chains in Asia, and its huge deposits of oil, gas, and the critical minerals needed to make weapons, “offers just about everything you need to wage war,” including a potential fighting force of millions of young men and women.

According to the United Nations, by 2050, Africa’s youth population, already the largest and youngest in the world, is projected to double to more than 830 million. Most are unemployed in countries that are underdeveloped and poverty-stricken.

“These disaffected people don’t need much motivation to join an army; that’s why all the rebel movements and terrorist groups never have a problem recruiting,” Martin said.

According to Nantulya, there has been a “dramatic increase” in the scope and intensity of Beijing’s military training exercises with African forces in recent years.

“It’s using these trainings to prepare for military expeditions and to further its geostrategic ambitions,” he said.

Heitman agreed, saying: “A few years ago these exercises were light, and China didn’t send anything special to the party, it was basically just public relations and military diplomacy. Now, they send their best people and high-grade weapons.”

Martin said recent Chinese-led naval exercises in Africa focused on “actual warfighting.”

“In South Africa, for example, China deployed a guided-missile destroyer and a sophisticated replenishment ship,” he said.

Nantulya said the Chinese regime’s two-week military exercises with Tanzania and Mozambique in July and August 2024 were “a significant expansion” of PLA engagement in Africa.

“The Chinese deployed at least 1,000 troops and conducted land and sea-based training involving maritime patrols, search and rescue, and live-fire drills,” he said.

In a report for the China Landpower Studies Center at the U.S. Army War College, military analyst Jake Vartanian said Chinese regime forces used 24 different types of weapons and equipment in the Tanzanian operation, including heavy artillery, micro unmanned aerial vehicles, and various reconnaissance and infantry vehicles.

Heitman said the Mozambican and Tanzanian exercises represented a first in the PRC’s military and security relations with Africa.

“In previous trainings, forces stationed at the Djibouti base would take part. This time, troops were transported from mainland China, a distance of 9,500 kilometers [about 5,903 miles],” he said.

“The Chinese used heavy navy vessels and aircraft and amphibious landing docks to get the troops onto African shores, at a high financial cost.”

Martin said Beijing’s maneuvers in Africa, and the Sahel in particular, offer valuable clues about the PRC’s evolving military strategy and what a future global PLA presence may look like.