Soldiers declare they have overthrown Niger’s president

The last seemingly solid government aligned with the West in the jihadist-plagued Sahel, a belt of poverty-stricken Francophone countries that spreads across the Sahara desert, seems to have fallen to a military coup. Late in the evening of July 26th a group of soldiers appeared on Niger’s national television to declare that they had “decided to put an end to the regime that you know”.