The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) have opened talks to establish a framework for cooperation, marking a new attempt to rebuild relations following years of political tensions over sovereignty, military coups, and regional sanctions.
The two blocs held their inaugural ministerial dialogue in Dakar, Senegal, on October 17, 2026, where they agreed to establish joint thematic working groups to develop a Cooperation Framework Agreement. The meeting brought together representatives of ECOWAS and the AES Confederation, comprising Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.
In a joint communiqué issued after the meeting, both sides welcomed the “spirit of fraternity, mutual respect, and openness” that characterized their discussions, recalling the historical, sociocultural and economic ties that unite the peoples of West Africa.
The parties also agreed that their future relations should be guided by “good neighborliness, respect for sovereignty, dignity, and the well-being of West African populations.”
The dialogue marks a significant diplomatic development following the deterioration of relations between ECOWAS and the three Sahelian countries, whose military-led governments have pursued a political course centered on national sovereignty and a rejection of established Western influence.
Relations between the two blocs deteriorated following military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger between 2020 and 2023. ECOWAS imposed sanctions and threatened further measures in response to the military takeovers, while the governments of the three countries increasingly challenged the regional organization’s authority.
In January 2024, the three countries announced their intention to withdraw from ECOWAS, their withdrawal formally took effect on January 29, 2025, opening a new chapter in regional relations.
The AES had been established in September 2023, initially creating a mutual defense framework among Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The three countries subsequently deepened their cooperation, formally establishing the Confederation of Sahel States in July 2024.
Throughout the confrontation, the Sahelian governments maintained that their decisions reflected the right of their peoples to determine their own political and economic futures. ECOWAS sanctions, particularly those imposed on Niger following the July 2023 coup, generated considerable opposition within the country and wider debate over the consequences of regional punitive measures for ordinary people.
For many supporters of the AES, ECOWAS’s response to the coups reinforced the perception that the organization was protecting Western, particularly French, strategic interests rather than defending the sovereignty of West African peoples.
According to the joint communiqué, the Dakar meeting followed earlier consultations held on May 22, 2025, in Bamako, Mali. The latest session allowed the parties to exchange views on areas of common interest and discuss how future negotiations could be structured.
Both sides expressed their willingness to pursue a cooperation framework that is “balanced, realistic and preserves the interests of their peoples.”
The communiqué further states that joint thematic working groups will undertake technical consultations towards developing a formal Cooperation Framework Agreement. Their findings will be submitted to the ministers for consideration before the next session.
The agreement to establish these working groups is an initial step towards institutionalizing dialogue between the two organizations. However, the communiqué does not specify a final agreement, a timetable for completing negotiations or detailed commitments in individual policy areas.
The discussions nevertheless provide an opening for the two blocs to address practical questions arising from their separation, including the maintenance of cross-border relations and the interests of communities whose economic and social lives extend across national boundaries.
Despite their institutional differences, the populations of the two blocs remain connected through trade, migration, family ties and shared cultural histories. The three AES countries are landlocked, and their economic relationships with neighboring West African states remain important to regional commerce and livelihoods as it defends its sovereignty.
Princes and Thieves, a new book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole, may open a rabbit hole into financial connections between Middle Eastern dictators and President Donald Trump's family. Cole accuses Emirati monarch Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) of sending billions of dollars to various mercenaries and political operators, including Jared Kushner, son-in-law to President Donald Trump. Cole's reporting combines well-documented connections with secondhand accounts from anonymous sources.
On Thursday, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from the book, reporting that Dutch military intelligence hacked into Kushner's phone in 2018 and discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in bank transfers connected to MBZ. Also on Thursday, Kushner published a letter from his lawyers to Cole categorically denying the "incredible and false" allegations in the book. "Mr. Kushner never accessed foreign accounts and always followed all rules and regulations and only pursued goals that were in the best interest of the United States as directed by the President of the United States," they wrote.
Cole had originally written on his blog that the book was scheduled for release on October 27, but the publication date was pushed forward over the weekend.
The book purports to tie Kushner to a vast web of Emirati influence operations around the world. In Cole's telling, which matches other journalists' accounts, MBZ wants to reshape the Middle East and eastern Africa into an alliance of U.S.-backed dictatorships, where "tolerance" is enforced through high-tech surveillance and "democracy" is a synonym for terrorism. MBZ's use of mercenaries in pursuit of these goals is well-documented. So is Kushner's personal affinity with the Emirati monarch and his business ties with the Arab monarchies.
Soon after Trump won the 2016 election, MBZ held a widely reported meeting with Kushner. According to the book—and according to much of that earlier reporting—the monarch complained about the Obama administration's failure to back Arab regimes against popular revolutions, its decision to end the Iraq War, and its diplomacy with Iran.
Going much further than past reporting, Cole now claims Kushner was personally involved in MBZ's mercenary operations. MBZ and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman put a collective $2 billion into Emirati and Israeli bank accounts which were managed (but not technically owned) by Kushner, according to Cole's sources. Those same sources claim that parts of this secret "slush fund" went to Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, American military contractor Erik Prince, and Cuban hitman Felipe Vidal.
Haftar, a former CIA asset, became a general in Libya's 2011 revolution and then attempted to overthrow the new government with Emirati backing in 2014. Despite a 2020 ceasefire, his forces continue to control much of Libya. Prince, founder of the military contractor formerly known as Blackwater, moved to the UAE and helped build a secret army of Colombian mercenaries. He sued Cole for defamation after Cole reported on Prince's role in helping Haftar, but a judge threw out the case. Cole's sources claimed that Vidal, a self-described "hit man," helped the United Arab Emirates (UAE) fake an Iranian attack on oil tankers in May 2019, meant to provoke Trump into war.
Kushner's lawyers have denied any relationship with any of those three men, apart from a single meeting with Prince after the 2016 election. (According to Cole, both Vidal and Prince refused to comment for the book.) The position of the U.S. government is that the May 2019 incident was a genuine Iranian attack, not an Emirati false flag.
After the Vanity Fair article was published last week, Israeli negotiator Gershon Baskin pointed out in The Jerusalem Post that the Central Bank of Israel "does not offer private banking services to individuals," which would make it impossible for Kushner's money to be deposited in the Central Bank of Israel, as Cole claimed. The book addresses that argument, claiming that the money was deposited "in what would appear to be a government account," with Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jointly authorizing transactions.
The Abraham Accords, which include an alliance between Israel and the UAE, have often been touted as a way for the U.S. to "spend less time and less resources in the Middle East," in the words of Vice President J.D. Vance. But Cole argues that the UAE actually used its alliance to entangle American interests in a future conflict. The book states that Kushner set up "a rainy-day defense fund" for war with Iran, using Emirati money deposited in a separate Central Bank of Israel account.
Cole also claims to have evidence that Kushner was on the take from the UAE's regional frenemy Qatar. In 2017, the UAE and Saudi Arabia issued an ultimatum for Qatar to rein in its foreign policy and blockaded the small nation. The Intercept later reported that Kushner's father had sought a Qatari bailout for the family real estate business just before the crisis, and the Qatari-linked company Brookfield ended up providing the needed investment in August 2018, leading to a congressional investigation into the deal.
Democrats are still digging for information on Kushner's business ties to Qatar, but three sources told Cole that the Qatari royal family authorized and paid for the Brookfield deal. The Qatari government "asked the White House how to resolve the blockade. And the Kushners kept saying, 'We have this great property that needs investment.' Eventually, the Qataris realized the only way to settle the blockade was to buy the building," a former U.S. intelligence officer said.
Kushner's lawyers write that they have "no evidence that Qatar impacted the investment decision. Any suggestion of his involvement in the transaction or any allegation of quid pro quo with the Qatari government is false and defamatory."
Other parts of the book are better-documented. Cole obtained a draft of Prince's autobiography, text messages from one of Prince's colleagues, and emails from Emirati government adviser George Nader, who was convicted of fraudulently funneling money into Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. If nothing else, the book is a comprehensive account of the UAE's unofficial empire and its American ties. But the most explosive claims about Kushner's involvement in those activities rest on anonymous sources, making it a matter of Cole's word against Kushner's.
"I considered the responses from Kushner's attorneys carefully and consulted multiple sources about them. During the five years I have spent working on this book, I have tried to keep an open mind, and I am confident that my reporting is accurate. Kushner's lawyers' responses did not change that conclusion," Cole writes in the book's epilogue.
The post New Book Says Jared Kushner Funneled Money to Middle East Mercenaries. Kushner Denies It. appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Commanders suspected of sexual violence during the largest and fastest slaughter of civilians in more than 30 years have been subjected to travel ban and asset freeze
Senior Sudanese commanders implicated in a “campaign of rape” have been targeted by the UK on the first anniversary of a mass atrocity that saw tens of thousands of civilians killed over several days.
A year after the fall of El Fasher, the British government said it had sanctioned military leaders from both sides in the country’s ongoing conflict whom it suspected of sexual violence during the siege of the city.
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© Photograph: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP/Getty Images
Exclusive: Coordinated airstrikes on territory held by al-Shabaab are driving the civilian population to find refuge alongside a river where rising water levels are a threat to safety. Is it a deliberate military strategy?
The water was rising rapidly. It had already reached Cayni Ali’s waist. Her home, five metres from the flooded River Juba in southern Somalia, never stood a chance. There was nowhere to go. Ali’s city of Jilib was under attack. Repeated airstrikes, said the mother of six, were pinning its population beside the rising river.
“The drones come all the time,” said the 27-year-old. “We hear them constantly. They kill animals, civilians. The town is big but destruction is everywhere.”
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© Photograph: Hugh Kinsella Cunningham
© Photograph: Hugh Kinsella Cunningham
© Photograph: Hugh Kinsella Cunningham
The Ukraine battlefield is the hottest part of Russia’s war on the West, but not the only one. The Kremlin is betting that sabotage, intimidation and other sub-threshold attacks will make Ukraine’s allies so distracted, scared and tired that they cut their support to Kyiv. Meanwhile Russia’s political warfare is reaping rewards in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The widening fronts in this global conflict are ably depicted in a new book, We Shall Outlast Them: Putin’s Global Campaign to Defeat the West by Hanna Notte.
The Berlin-based, Oxbridge-educated Russia expert unpicks Kremlin influence operations in a dozen-plus countries. Her reporting is meticulous, the descriptions vivid, and the conclusion bleak: Russia is using the West’s own weakness to beat us.
One paradox is globalisation: the West’s main project since the collapse of communism, but which now undermines its sanctions efforts.
China, North Korea, Iran and other countries in what Notte calls the “Eurasian roundabout” help Russia export and import what it needs to keep its war machine running.
Hard-headed shipping magnates in Dubai will not stop dealing with the “shadow fleet”, any more than Indian energy tycoons will shun cheap oil. It’s just business, they tell her.
But not only that.
Many in the mis-named “Global South” instinctively despise Ukraine as an American proxy. The irony is head-spinning: Ukraine is treated as a pariah for its ties to a supposed patron that has now all but abandoned it.
As well as exploiting anti-Americanism (whatever that means these days) Russia also draws on deep historical sympathies that are all but incomprehensible seen from the former captive nations of Europe.
Many influential Africans, for example, have bitter first-hand or inherited memories of US treatment of their continent in the Cold War, including support for apartheid-era South Africa.
They also have a rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union, which supported their liberation struggle. Some studied there. That Ukraine is the victim of a revanchist imperialist Russia makes no sense to them; interviewed by Notte, they struggle to see it as a real country.
This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership
Rapid Support Forces strike five power stations in three states controlled by Sudanese army
Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have launched a coordinated drone attack against five power stations, causing mass power outages across the country’s east, a government official said.
The drones hit two power stations each in the states of Al-Jazira and Gedaref and one in White Nile state, “resulting in power outages across large parts of these three states”, the official said on condition of anonymity.
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© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The first state to be ruled by Al Qaeda might not be in Afghanistan or the Arab world—and its ruler might be a former whiskey-drinking rock star. In April, the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims ("JNIM" in Arabic) led an uprising in the African nation of Mali, killing Defense Minister Sadio Camara, breaking open a prison holding thousands of inmates, and besieging Bamako, the capital. The fighting was still underway as of August.
Mali is not the only place threatened by a JNIM takeover. The West African branch of Al Qaeda is active in a belt of countries known as the Sahel. Its leader, Iyad Ag Ghali, was the former percussionist for the rock band Tinariwen. He now leads a campaign to stamp out the "music of Satan." Perhaps the one saving grace for Sahelian metalheads is that puritans can't get along with each other: The JNIM is locked in a war with the rival Islamic State Sahel Province.
The Sahelian civil wars are a testament to the failure of the global war on terror. Despite spending $355 billion on African counterterrorism from 2001 to 2021, the U.S. government has been unable to stop Al Qaeda or related Islamist groups from taking root across the continent. A study by the Pentagon's Africa Center for Strategic Studies found a 101,300 percent increase in terrorism fatalities from 2002 to 2022, mostly concentrated in the Sahel and Somalia.
These wars demonstrate that the solution to terrorism isn't maximum violence. President Donald Trump launched four times as many airstrikes against Somalia in his first 18 months of his second term as the U.S. did over the past four years combined. U.S. military aid has flowed to repressive governments across Africa with little respect for their citizens' rights. Since 2020, there have been coups d'etat across the Sahel by military men promising that they can do the dirty work that civilian leaders are afraid of. Many of them were trained by the U.S. government. The new regimes have imported Russian mercenaries with a reputation for brutality and no real restraints on their activities.
"People need to forget about the question of democracy," Ibrahim Traoré, leader of Burkina Faso, declared in April.
Instead of restoring order, these heavy-handed tactics have caused more chaos. The military juntas in the Sahel are plainly losing to the JNIM. While the Russian fighters have no difficulties massacring civilians or mutilating prisoners, they have found it much harder to face people who can actually shoot back, facing repeated battlefield humiliations. Meanwhile, the U.S.-led campaign against al-Shabab, the Somali branch of Al Qaeda, has stalled out despite the heavier use of airpower.
The African war on terror began shortly after the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. To some extent, the U.S. created the very threats that it is trying to fight in Africa. Somalia had been at civil war since the fall of socialism, and in the early 2000s, the CIA began funding Somali warlords to stop the rise of Islamist revolutionaries. The (relatively moderate) Islamic Courts Union took over anyway in 2006—uniting Somalia for the first time in more than a decade—and the U.S. encouraged neighboring Ethiopia to invade. When al-Shabab emerged to fight the Ethiopian invaders, the U.S. tapped a former leader of the Islamic Courts Union to lead a new Somali government.
Soon after the Ethiopian-Somali war, President George W. Bush created the Pentagon's Africa Command, and Congress budgeted $500 million in aid to militaries in the Sahara Desert and the Sahel. At the time, the main Islamist threat to that region was a mostly defeated insurgency in Algeria.
But the Libyan civil war in 2011 created terrible new monsters. Soon after President Barack Obama intervened in support of the Libyan revolution, weapons and hardened fighters from Libya flooded the ethnic Tuareg region of Mali, which declared independence a few months later. Soon after, Al Qaeda and its affiliates took over the Tuareg rebellion. With the Malian government coming close to collapse, France intervened in January 2013 and made many of the same mistakes that the U.S. did in its own war on terror.
Ag Ghali, the current leader of the JNIM, got his start as a Tuareg nationalist. A leaked U.S. embassy cable from 2008 called him a "proverbial bad penny" who enjoyed "playing both sides" and had ties to Islamist and secular nationalist rebels. By the time of the French intervention, he was fully committed to Islamic theocracy. In 2017, he united Islamist rebels across the Sahel under the banner of Al Qaeda. That same year, four U.S. Special Forces troops were killed in Niger by the Islamic State group, which was busy uniting Ag Ghali's rivals.
Despite the failures of the Sahelian governments to stop Ag Ghali—and their willingness to ally with Russia—the Trump administration is eager to double down on supporting them. The U.S. government increased intelligence sharing with Mali in 2025, and as of July it was considering a direct military intervention against the JNIM, according to The Washington Post. But every American escalation on the continent has produced the enemy that the next one had to fight.
The post America Is Spending Billions To Fight the War on Terror in Africa. The Terrorists Are Winning. appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Calculations from the Center for Global Development say spending next year is likely to be £410m less than anticipated
The UK is on course to miss its target of spending 0.3% of national income on international aid by an estimated £400m by the end of next year.
Calculations from the Center for Global Development (CGD) found the UK was on course for a large shortfall in promised official development assistance at the end of 2027.
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© Photograph: Patrick Ngugi/AP
© Photograph: Patrick Ngugi/AP
© Photograph: Patrick Ngugi/AP
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