Jihadists in the Sahel threaten west Africa’s coastal states

“YOU MAY think you’re safe,” says a 57-year-old resident of Doropo in northern Ivory Coast. “But jihadists are like ants, they can come in without being noticed.” On June 11th, just three weeks after Ivory Coast’s army reassuringly declared that its northern frontier with war-torn Burkina Faso was “under control”, a band of armed insurgents proved it wrong. Some 20 men on motorbikes descended on an army-and-police outpost near the border at Kafolo. The attackers killed 14 soldiers before roaring away into the bush.The attack was the worst since 2016, when gunmen killed 19 people in a beach resort in Grand-Bassam, east of Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s commercial capital. It shows that even west Africa’s most populous countries, along the Atlantic coast, have become vulnerable to the predations of jihadists spilling out of failing states farther north in the Sahel, that vast swathe of land on the rim of the Sahara desert.