Travel in the Sahel: how safe are tourists in Northwest Africa?

The recent deaths of two Frenchmen in eastern Mali, kidnapped from a restaurant across the border in Niger, was widely treated by the media as an example of a brazen new audacity by southern offshoots of the so-called “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM). With foreign ministries in many countries, including Britain, France, USA and Australia, beefing up their advisory notices to travellers and expatriates in Mali and other parts of the Sahel, and various alarmist reports beginning to appear in the media, I think it’s a good moment to look at what has actually happened over the last few years and try to assess the real risks of travel to the Sahara and Sahel.

Although the earliest major incident took place in 2003, when 32 tourists in different groups were kidnapped in coordinated attacks in Algeria and held for ransom, the 27 cases described below (nine killed, twelve freed, six still held) go back to 2007 and cover Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Mali and Niger.

Deaths

The current perception of a crisis began in December 2007 when four French tourists were murdered during a roadside robbery in southern Mauritania. In June 2009 a British tourist kidnapped in southeast Mali was presumed executed (his body has never been found). In the same month an American aid worker was shot and killed in Nouakchott. In mid-2010, an elderly French kidnap victim died or was executed in Niger. And then in January 2011, two Frenchmen were abducted in Niamey and killed less than twenty-four hours later over the border in eastern Mali, either before or during a rescue raid by French and Nigérien forces.

Freed abductees

Since the beginning of 2008 a total of twelve other travellers and expatriates have been abducted and released unharmed, some after more than a year in captivity. Of the twelve, two were tourists kidnapped in southern Tunisia early in 2008 and eventually released in Mali; two were Canadian diplomats kidnapped in Niger in December 2008: four were abducted in two different incidents in January 2009 after the Andéramboukane Music festival on the Mali-Niger border and subsequently held together, and five were abducted in Mauritania, again in two different incidents, also in 2009.

Current captives

Five French mining expatriates abducted in Niger in 2010 (together with two colleagues from Togo and Madagascar) and anItalian tourist kidnapped near Djanet in southern Algeria in February 2011 remain in captivity at the time of writing.

Sahel travel in the balance

It’s a depressing tally, and the impact on the victims and their families is impossible to overstate. Nevertheless, when measured against attacks attributed to Al-Qaeda around the world over the last decade, including bombings and other attacks in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey, Kenya, Tanzania, London, Madrid, Bali and of course New York it’s an extremely small number (more about the statistics below). Although we never get to hear the full story about hostage negotiations and ransom payments, it is widely believed that millions of dollars were paid by government intermediaries on behalf of the Italian, Spanish and Swiss hostages (the French and British governments are notable for publically declaring they will not pay ransoms to hostage-takers).

Ransom money is the main factor in the Sahel abductions, not ideology. If AQIM is a jihadist organisation, its methods are different from those of Osama bin Laden’s other followers. Rather than planning coordinated suicide bomb attacks on iconic targets such as embassies and hotels, AQIM is content to extort money from susceptible European governments, much after the style of Somali pirates hijacking tankers in the Indian Ocean. And perhaps surprisingly, too, AQIM don’t seem to be spending their millions on new attacks (although they did recently launch an abortive assassination raid on the president of Mauritania) or even on ramping up their hostage-taking.

It seems clear that the initial capture of hostages is often carried out by freelance bandits who sell their victims on to AQIM, who then run the propaganda and negotiations, invariably in the same remote region of northeast Mali. The same freelance gangs, also traffic cannabis, weapons and migrants across the desert and run major cocaine rackets, taking part in the shipment of South American cocaine consignments from coastal creeks in Guinea-Bissau to North Africa and Europe.

Somewhere in all this, you also have to reckon with the deep-seated and well-founded resentment of some of the Tuareg nomad communities of the southern Sahara over their treatment as second-class citizens by the national governments of Algeria, Mali and Niger. Major Tuareg uprisings in the 1990s in Mali and Niger ended with a successful peace agreement in Mali, but fizzled out inconclusively in Niger, only to rage into life again as a full insurrection in 2007. Since then, anti-government hostilities, banditry and AQIM attacks have often been ascribed to Tuareg perpetrators, without much clear evidence. Tuareg websites have been vociferous in dissociating their community from any links with AQIM and there is certainly no cultural affinity between hardline interpretations of the Koran and the more pragmatic and tolerant lifestyle of Tuareg communities.

Whatever the truth about AQIM’s membership and origins*, the repercussions for travellers have been many: closed routes across the Sahara**; threats to Mali’s music festivals***; and a very uncertain future for the nascent tourist industry in Mauritania, which was just beginning to enjoy the fruits of success with the opening of the new tarmac road from Nouadhibou to Nouakchott, allowing overlanders to drive on tarmac the whole way from Europe to Dakar, and regular charter flights on the French airline Le Point to Atar, Tamanrasset, Djanet and Agadez.

While Niger’s tourist industry has effectively dried up completely because so much of the country is deemed too unsafe to travel in, the relatively healthy tourist industry in Mali has been steadily growing for many years, fuelled by the lure of the Niger River, the music festivals and the scenery and culture of the Dogon country east of Mopti. The new travel warnings – especially the British FCO’s lurid map of Mali – treat completely safe regions, including Mopti and the Dogon country, as “too unsafe to travel”. This sledgehammer approach to travel advice is confusing to travellers who cannot see its logic, and damaging to local communities that rely on a steady trickle of tourist income for much of their cash needs. I’d say there’s also a strong chance that one of the consequences of advising against all travel to Timbuktu, Djenné, Mopti and the Dogon country is exactly the kind of incident that the British embassy in Bamako is hoping to prevent. For those travellers who robustly cross the line, having spent long enough on travel forums to realise how many others are doing the same, being pickpocketed or robbed seems more likely in a region whose economy has been slammed by a diplomat’s red infill on a map.

My advice

Of course it’s extraordinarily difficult to give advice when any new event can change the map. In Mauritania, my sense is that travelling on the main tarmac highway between Nouadhibou and Nouakchott, is currently relatively safe. The Mauritanian security forces are out in numbers patrolling around the country and the fight seems to be more with them these days and less with tourists. So if your plans are to travel overland between Morocco and Senegal, you should have no serious worries about following through. I would still be extremely cautious about venturing out and about in the interior of Mauritania, however, and especially in the southeast.

In Mali, I can’t explain the recent blanket “we advise against all travel east of Ségou” government travel advisories. To me these seem like a massive over-reaction to a spotty catalogue of incidents over many years that have all taken place many hundreds of miles to the northeast. You don’t have to search far on the travel forums to find glowing accounts by returning travellers of their recent experiences in central Mali – in the Dogon country, in Mopti and Djenné, along the Niger, and in Timbuktu – and mystification at why their governments are advising against anyone following in their footsteps. Admittedly, crossing the Niger River feels like a genuine increase in risk, especially if you’re planning to cross it at Gao. I personally would not visit Gao at present or travel along the north bank of the Niger anywhere between the Niger border and Timbuktu, and obviously from what I have said I wouldn’t venture further east or north, or go to either of the festivals in the area. I’m prepared to accept even this may be an exaggerated response to perceived threats. Timbuktu itself reportedly feels perfectly safe and the recent Festival au Désert was a great success. What I find remarkable is the statement on the FCO Mali travel advice page that not a single British person in Mali required consular assistance between April 2009 and August 2010. That seems a pretty good record.

Niger, sadly, is bearing the brunt of the current security situation. I think a repeat of the January attack in Niamey itself is extremely unlikely – particularly as it was so spectacularly unsuccessful for the kidnappers – so the idea of flying to the capital feels safe enough. As does, frankly, taking the road east along the Nigerian border as far as Zinder. To the north of this route I think you would be pushing your luck and I wouldn’t go into northern Niger myself at present. The British travel advisory map seems reasonable enough, bearing in mind their generally over-cautious approach, though it doesn’t quite match the references in the text to the road between Niamey and Gao.

Statistically, how safe is the Sahel?

In terms of numbers, somewhere around 100,000 European and North American tourists, business travellers and expatriate workers visit Mauritania, Mali and Niger annually. The total area of the three countries, including the empty desert areas, is more than 3.6 million square kilometres, and although their combined population of 33 million people live in only about a third of that area, that slab of land – the one third that is inhabited – still accounts for an area that is twice the size of Texas and five times as big as Britain. By my calculation, based on the nine visitors who have been killed since December 2007, the “tourist murder rate” in these three Sahel countries is around 3 per 100,000. The homicide rate for the USA is currently 5 per 100,000 and for the UK and Australia it is 1.3 per 100,000.

So there you have it. The Sahel does carry some increased risk of kidnap or murder compared with staying at home – although that will depend on your neighbourhood (no doubt there are feisty travellers who could demonstrate that staying back home in LA, Glasgow or Jo’burg is much more dangerous). The small increased risk is spread very thinly over many years and among hundreds of thousands of visitors and you can reduce it considerably by staying out of the more risky areas. Be sure to take out travel insurance, and if your insurance broker won’t cover you for certain countries or regions, then find one who will, or ask what the extra premium would be.

Further reading

There’s very useful information on the security situation in the Sahel on the brilliant Horizons Unlimited; at the always thoughtful Sahel Blog; in a couple of posts on a blog I hadn’t heard of before called Selected Wisdom, here and here; and in this interesting article about Organized Crime and Terrorism in the Sahel.

And of course there’s lots of pertinent information in the current edition of the Rough Guide to West Africa.

Forums

Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree has a huge international user base and you’ll get feedback from people on the ground, including many whose first language isn’t English. It’s fairly loosely moderated, however, and if you like to subscribe using RSS you can only do so at the Africa level.

Trip Advisor, while very Anglophone and less adventurous than Thorn Tree, can be subscribed on RSS country by country.

Guide du Routard, in French, is very useful for the Sahel, and again you can keep in touch with threads on each country using RSS.

Horizons Unlimited, principally for motorcyclists, runs two carefully monitored and relevant Horizons Unlimited Bulletin Boards (HUBB), one for North Africa and the Sahara and one for Sub-Saharan Africa where you’ll often find the most up-to-date and informed travel advice for the region.

*Some Sahara analysts believe AQIM is little more than an agent provocateur organisation, created by the Algerian intelligence service to justify the country’s authoritarian government and draw their American military partners into the region in the “Global War on Terror”. The picture is almost impenetrably complex, with the identity of participants sometimes altering (jihadist one day, businessman the next) according to company and circumstances. Jeremy Keenan at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies is a well known exponent of this view. There’s a fascinating interview with him in German.

** The Tanezrouft route between Adrar and Gao, closed for most of the 1990s during Algeria’s civil war, was sporadically open to tourists and trans-Saharan trade between 2003 and 2008 but is currently closed, while the Route du Hoggar, between Tamanrasset and Agadez has remained technically open, but requires great flexibility and confidence: if you’re not robbed by bandits you may well be ripped off by demanding local officials as they insist you be escorted, at great expense, on sections of the route.

*** The Festival au Désert at Timbuktu takes places each January, and hundreds of foreign visitors attend, so far without incident. The lesser known Festival sur le Niger, in Ségou, is acquiring a similarly devoted following. There are other festivals: the Tamasonghoï festival at Bourem north of Gao and the Tamadacht festival at Andéramboukane in the far southeast of Mali. Four Europeans leaving the latter festival in January 2009 were held hostage for a number of months before their respective governments paid ransoms for three of them. The fourth, a Briton named Edwin Dyer, was executed.