In recent news, there have been a series of terrorist attacks in the landlocked West African nation of Burkina Faso:
Twelve civilians were killed on Thursday during a jihadist attack in the north of Burkina Faso, which has been battling a wave of Islamist violence, officials said on Friday.
The west African country declared a state of emergency in several provinces at the end of last year and on Thursday replaced its army chief as it struggled to put a stop to a spate of such attacks.
In the latest violence, gunmen attacked a village market in broad daylight, the security ministry said in a statement issued late on Friday.
“Around 30 armed individuals perpetrated… a terrorist attack in the village of Gasseliki,” it said, giving a toll of 12 dead and two wounded.
“A barn, a cart and six shops were also set alight,” it added.
A local source told AFP that the attackers “ransacked stores and opened fire on people who had gathered for the weekly market”.
Jihadist attacks began in northern Burkina Faso in 2015 but then spread to the east, near the border with Togo and Benin.
The country is part of the vast Sahel region and one of the poorest states in the world.
The region turned into a hotbed of violent extremism and lawlessness after chaos engulfed Libya in 2011, which was followed by an Islamist insurgency in northern Mali and the rise of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria.
Most attacks in Burkina Faso itself have been attributed to the jihadist group Ansarul Islam, which emerged near the Mali border in December 2016, and to the JNIM (the Group to Support Islam and Muslims), which has sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Ansarul Islam emerged as violence spilled over from Mali, where radical Islamists seized key Sahara towns in 2012 before being ousted by French troops.
Smaller groups are also active, with the overall number of fighters estimated to be in the hundreds, according to security sources.
The groups are believed to be responsible for more than 270 deaths since 2015. The capital Ouagadougou has been hit three times and almost 60 people have died there.
The jihadists extend their hold gradually, forcing government workers and others who oppose them to flee. The violence has so far displaced some 40 000 people.
In the north, armed groups move freely through the country’s porous borders.
The jihadists mainly target the security forces, but also attack government officials and local chiefs who oppose them.
Teachers are vulnerable due to the jihadists’ fierce opposition to secular, French education, with their threats and attacks sparking the closure of hundreds of schools in the north and the east.
As the country struggles to get on top of the violence, army chief Major General Oumarou Sadou was replaced on Thursday by General Moise Minoungou, according to a presidential decree read on public television. (source, source)
The Council on Foreign Relations, a major group associated with the financial-military-industrial complex and which exercises great influence in the USA and abroad, spoke about the rise of US-created and backed terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda to her and her neighbors in West Africa:
On December 3, police officers killed six terrorists after a security patrol was ambushed in eastern Burkina Faso. Reports from the country in the past year point to a worrying sign that the spread of Islamist terrorism continues unabated in the West African country. Jihadis, many of whom are affiliated with al-Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups active in Mali, now operate in and sometimes control parts of the north and east of the country, many of which are labelled no-go zones due to government’s inability to secure them. The east has historically played host to local militias and crime syndicates, which operate with impunity in a region largely outside of the government’s influence.
Islamist terrorism has wracked the Sahel for several years now, but it is a relatively recent phenomenon in Burkina Faso. Its arrival is partly related to the fall from power of former President Blaise Compaore. Popular unrest in response to a failed bid to extend his nearly three decade-long tenure in 2014 pushed Campaore from power. The country’s Western-trained presidential guard, still loyal to the former president, staged a coup to topple the transitional government in 2015. The coup ultimately failed and the presidential guard was subsequently dissolved.
The dissolution of the presidential guard left a hole in the Burkinabe security apparatus, providing an opening for jihadist groups to expand in the country. Some believe that the recent spate of attacks have been supported by former members of the presidential guard, who could see these Islamist groups as their way back into power, though no direct evidence to support this is available. Initially, terror groups affiliated with Tuareg rebels in Mali and al-Qaeda primarily operated in the north of the country, along the border with Mali. In 2016, the situation escalated as attacks led by these groups began targeting southern Burkina Faso, including the capital Ouagadougou. This year has seen the spread of Islamist terrorism to the east, along the border with Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Niger. (source, source)
It is a known fact that Al-Qaeda was a US creation as a part of Operation Cyclone, and has lead to the creation of other groups as but one of many affiliated projects in Operation Gladio. You can read our archives for more information about Gladio.
Note the other nations in the CFR article in bold above and their location in Africa. The nations mentioned in the article have red dots. Cameroon and Togo have an orange dot, in order to note that for many years, they were economic colonies of Germany on the buildup to World War I as a part of the Scramble for Africa. Nigeria, who is China’s largest supporter outside of China, a major ally of Russia in Africa, and a regional powerhouse, is marked with a green dot:
If you have not read my analysis on Nigeria, terrorism, and the Chinese Yuan, you need to read it because I detail how given the history of the US and other western governments of using Islamic terrorism for political purposes, the increase in terrorism in Nigeria must not be looked at as a simple issue of Christian persecution, but as an extension of Operation Gladio against Russian and Chinese interests in the region.
If you have not read my analysis of Germany’s colonies in West Africa, you need to read it because I describe how Germany and the other European powers are returning to their former colonies and are looking to use them again as sources of raw materials in preparation for another economic buildup leading to a greater war.
Nigeria is a major producer of oil and gas, and a large amount of her income is derived from that. As the Oil and Gas Journal reported in 2007, vast resources of oil and gas have been discovered in Africa that extend all the way from the central regions of West Africa into the heart of the Congo:
For more than half a century the West Africa region, in particular the countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea and Congo Delta, has been one of the most exciting and attractive regions in the world for the oil industry.
A review of E&P literature as well as an assessment of the strategy of all major international oil companies reveals that this region has not only remained attractive in recent years but that in the future it will become even more important.
From an E&P perspective, the excellent exploration record and the start of many new fields over the last few years particularly in deep water are proof that the region has remained attractive. However, the facts that oil production will continue to expand in the coming years and that more oil is to be found clearly indicate that the region will become even more important in the future.
The countries that comprise West Africa include Nigeria and several non-OPEC countries. The latter group includes seven important producers, three small producers, and many nonproducers.
The important producers are Angola (defines the southern limit of West Africa), Cameroon, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Mauritania (defines the northern limit of West Africa). The small producers are Benin, Ghana, and Senegal. The nonproducers include Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, and Togo. (source, source)
If one looks again at a map of West Africa, one notes that while Togo may not have oil resources discovered yet as the article notes, Togo is not only a former German colony, but along with Benin, Sierra Leone, and the other coastal nations is an undeveloped nation that provides a direct pathway into the oilfields within the African jungles and also which can go around Nigeria, economically circumventing her and given the fact that such routes also extend into her northern neighbor of Niger, has the ability to economically isolate her by land and sea on all sides.
Right now, there are no known fields operating in Burkina Faso, as well as many other West African nations as the article aptly noted. However, this does not mean that oil is not existent within them. Indeed, the theory that oil is within them is not unreasonable because many of her surrounding neighbors, such as Benin, Ghana, and Senegal, are already producing oil, and Ivory Coast is a major producer. The issue is most likely not one of a lack of oil, but rather the plaguing problem within Africa of a lack of development due to rampant corruption and a general lack of focus of the people and their leaders at developing their nations. Nigeria is the most important exception to them, for while she is also rampant with corruption and problems, she has actually done something with her nation to better herself in terms of economics.
China is exploiting oil fields already known or in operation within Nigeria. The US and Europe buy oil from Nigeria, but they are also way ahead of the Chinese in that just as I outlined in my article on Azerbaijan with CIA documents largely still classified even since World War II that show the heavy concentration of untapped oil in the Turanian Basin and Caucasus mountains region, so too is West Africa most likely a giant oilfield waiting to be drilled and the Americans and Europeans are working aggressively to find and exploit these fields.
In order to get said oil supplies from West Africa to boats and/or refineries, it needs to travel either by truck or by pipeline. Given the dangerous nature of many parts of West Africa, it will most likely be carried by pipeline to the coast, where just as the US fills ships each day with crude oil to take to her refineries throughout the coasts, said oil will likely be transported by pipeline to the coast before traveling to the US. In the case of Europe, this will be much easier because the trans-Mediterranean pipeline extends from the southernmost points in Nigeria due north through Niger and Algeria before going to France:
If access to the sea was not enough, then this pipeline’s very existence in combination with the potential for massive oil deposits in the region and the ability to cut off Nigeria from access if they wished is why such activity is taking place. The pipeline is in an area ripe for development, and only needs to have social and government conditions made favorable so that further prospecting and work can continue.
While Cameroon and Congo are further east and south of Burkina Faso, their concentrations of oil within them suggest that not only are they major fields waiting to be exploited, but that they could be part of the same oil field that links with West Africa, potentially making Africa truly the “dark continent” in that she sits on a giant oil field of which only select parts have been exploited. Indeed, it is also curious that at the same time these “terrorist” attacks are taking place in Burkina Faso and West Africa, so has the US moved troops into the Central African nation of Gabon on the border of Congo and Cameroon following an attempt at a military coup in that nation, which provides a port-of-exit to the ocean from already existing pipelines and provides the dual benefit of setting up a port that could be militarized by which to shut off Chinese oil access in route to Nigeria if they so desired to.
Recall the Turkish pipelines coming from Azerbaijan and points around the Caucasus mountains. What is taking place here in Africa is a part of the same strategy there because one must recall that in order for Germany to win any war with Russia, she needs a constant flow of oil into her economy so to drive her war machine. Germany lost the Second World War not because she was not strong enough, but because she ran out of oil due to her being cut off from the oil fields around the Caspian Sea following her loss at Stalingrad. This was also the reason why the fight for Stalingrad was so horrendous, because that one battle determined the rest of World War II, and the Russians knew if they lost that they would likely fall to Germany, and that if Germany lost they would likely be forced to surrender in the future.
Germany has learned her lessons from World War I and II, and is attempting to repeat the past wars but this time to succeed in her attempts. To do this, she is taking preparatory measures to create what appears to be a massive network of railways and pipelines from oilfields to Europe so that no matter what is attacked, there will either be such a prevalence of transportation means, such an interconnection of pipelines, and such an inseparability between the pipelines and transportation means and the rest of the world that it will either be impossible to successfully attack them, and if they are attacked that it would affect so many people it would turn public outrage against the nation who attacked them so to alter the course of a war.
Most of the focus as noted above has been in the Turanian basin through Turkey, the Caucasus, and around Ukraine and the Middle East. However, given the proximity of Europe to Africa and the already existing oil lines in Africa, it naturally makes sense for Europe to build upon what is already set up, reinforcing and expanding it so to solidify sources for oil as well as to find new ones and be able to exert control over them before a conflict begins.
The development of oil fields and pipelines in West and Central African must continue to be watched because just as with the German presence increasing in her former colonies, one is seeing a silent scramble for Africa take place, which was the exact historical event that preceded the First and Second World Wars, and if it continues will inevitably be a harbinger of a Third World War.