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.
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.
France needs a foothold in the Sahel because it contains former colonies that made it rich and continue to build its economy.
The United States wants troops in the Sahel to counter the area’s many extremist organizations affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS, the world’s biggest global terrorist networks that have declared jihad on America.
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,” said Helmoed Heitman, a South African defense analyst, military strategist, and former officer in the country’s National Defense Force.
Guy Martin, an analyst at DefenceWeb, a website focused on defense-related matters in Africa, said China’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 including 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.
Martin said Beijing also needs to ensure the security of thousands of Chinese workers and businesses in Africa.
Heitman said China wants to use the Sahel as a base from which to sell weapons and ammunition to the entire continent.
However, Russian arms sales to Africa collapsed from $315 million in 2022 to $102 million in 2023, said the study.
Over the same period, China’s weapons sales to the continent increased by almost the same amount, from $103 million to $306 million.
Paul Nantulya, a senior analyst 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 Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and many other areas.
The SIPRI report said at least 21 countries in sub-Saharan Africa received large shipments of Chinese arms between 2019 and 2023.
Nantulya told The Epoch Times China is using its economic dominance in Africa, as its largest trade partner and having funded much of the continent’s infrastructure builds over the past decade, to “militarize and securitize” its policy in Africa.
Heitman told The Epoch Times 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 the previous July, Niger’s military rulers asked 1,000 American troops to leave the country, with the United States completing the withdrawal in August.
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.”
Géraud Byamungu, an analyst at the China–Global South Project based in Johannesburg and Washington, told The Epoch Times the departure of American soldiers from Niger was the “final nail in the coffin” that opened up the Sahel to China and Russia because for the first time in decades, there’s now no official Western security or military presence in the region.
The Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a military research organization in Arlington, Virginia, said the withdrawal of American and French troops from the Sahel presents a unique opportunity for China to expand its military influence in the region.
The organization, which has access to U.S. intelligence sources, said the PLA maintains a permanent deployed operational presence of roughly 4,100 servicemembers in Africa and its surrounding waters, with 2,000 stationed at its base in Djibouti.
The CNA concluded that the possibility of China 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,” wrote the authors of the report.
“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,” they said.
The CNA said China 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,” said Heitman.
He added that the continent, with its long coastlines and ports giving it easy access to Europe, the Middle East and supply chains in Asia, and 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.
Most, said the U.N., 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,” said Martin.
According to Nantulya, there’s been a “dramatic increase” in the scope and intensity of China’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.”
Nantulya said China’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 explained.
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 [almost 6,000 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 China’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.
