Beijing plans to send more troops and weapons to favored regions in Africa as it seeks to protect assets and prepare for combat.
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 governments toppled 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 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.
