Benin’s government may have thwarted a coup attempt against President Patrice Talon yesterday. But in Guinea-Bissau, the military successfully seized power last week, and the takeover is just the latest in a series of coups across West Africa in recent years. 

Almost all have taken place in the Sahel, the semi-arid belt below the Sahara that bisects the continent. Each coup had “unique triggers,” said researcher Salah Ben Hammou at The Conversation, but they are not isolated events. This is a “coup cascade.”

How did it begin?
When Libya’s Gaddafi regime collapsed in 2011, an “abundance of weaponry” was looted and spread across the Sahel, said the newsletter Proximities. Members of Mali’s Tuareg group who had fought in Libya returned home seeking an autonomous state in the north of their country. 

The rebels aligned themselves with multiple Islamist jihadist groups and began capturing territory. The conflict quickly spread into neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, centring on the tri-border region in the western Sahel, known as the Liptako-Gourma, which “allows the biggest of the rebel groups to engage in a war with three governments at once.”

When Malian soldiers ousted Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in 2020, it “marked the beginning of a broader wave of military takeovers,” said Hammou at The Conversation. Soldiers “toppled governments” in Chad and Guinea in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022 (twice), and Gabon and Niger in 2023. And at the eastern end of the Sahel, Sudan “descended into a devastating civil war” after a coup there in 2021.

What connects the coups?
Analysts point to weak governance and corruption, growing Islamist terrorist insurgencies, and the destabilizing effects of the climate crisis, as well as rising anti-Western (particularly French) sentiment fanned by Russia. Some blame the Economic Community of West African States for lacking a coherent response.

Sahelian countries are in “danger of swapping one kind of imperialism for another,” said the Financial Times. In Mali, Russian mercenaries promised protection for the military junta and “defeat of a dogged Islamist insurgency.” But now, with al-Qaida-affiliated fighters encircling the capital with a “crushing fuel blockade” and talk of another coup, it’s “clear the Russians have brought neither peace nor stability.”

What happens next?
“Almost without the world noticing, the Sahel has become the epicenter of global terrorism,” said the FT. More than half of all terrorism-related deaths last year occurred there, according to the Global Terrorism Index. And the” fear among more prosperous coastal states is that militant Islam will spread south.”

European leaders struggling to address the years of bloodshed on the border with Russia reached a milestone agreement last week, starting the clock on plans to fully uncouple the European Union from Russian gas exports. Under the new agreement, European nations will end liquefied natural gas imports in the coming year, with long-term pipeline contracts closed by the end of 2027. Europe is “turning off the tap on Russian gas forever,” said EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen on X. “We stand strong with Ukraine.”

‘Choke off’ funds for Moscow’s ‘war chest’
Today, Russian gas accounts for some 12% of EU gas imports — down from 45% in the years before Russia’s still-ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Under the new agreement, member nations will not only transition away from existing Russian gas supplies but must submit “national diversification plans outlining measures for diversifying their gas supplies and potential challenges” ahead of the 2027 deadline, the EU said in a press release. The governing body “seeks to choke off key funds feeding Moscow’s war chest” during its offensive against Ukraine, said Le Monde.

The agreement comes as part of the EU’s “REPowerEU Roadmap” to energy independence from Russia. This initiative has “shielded us from the worst energy crisis in decades” and “helped us to transition” from Russian gas and oil at “record speed,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. Currently, the EU “sources the majority of its gas” from other suppliers, including the U.S.,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Looming challenges from within
Predictably, Russia has responded to the EU agreement with criticism, claiming the move would “doom Europe to becoming less competitive” and “lead to higher prices for consumers,” said Reuters. But frustration over the new oil and gas rules hasn’t been limited to Moscow. 

“Accepting and implementing this Brussels order is impossible for Hungary,” said Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto in a broadcast on his Facebook page. Slovakia has also “complained of the impact” on its national economy should it be forced to reject Russian fuel, said Radio Free Europe. Slovakia has “sufficient legal grounds to consider filing a lawsuit” against the agreement, said Prime Minister Robert Fico. But opposition lawmakers have countered that “such a step would disgrace Slovakia,” said The Slovak Spectator, and is “advancing Russian interests in Europe.”

People sing and dance in Umayyad Square in Damascus as Syria marks the first anniversary of the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. President Ahmed al-Sharaa vowed today to “rebuild a strong Syria with a structure befitting its present and its past.”
Chris McGrath / Getty Images

Not everything can be taken at face value during the era of generative artificial intelligence. With AI video apps becoming more sophisticated, the internet is overflowing with hyper-realistic AI videos that can be indistinguishable from reality. Luckily, there are a few ways you can determine whether what you are looking at is real or an extremely convincing fake.

Check for watermarks
One of the easiest ways to spot AI-generated videos is by watermarks. Videos made with Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, include an “easy-to-spot watermark, usually at the bottom left,” said PC Mag. Nonetheless, some removal tools are “nearly perfect or imperceptible, especially if the video is very simple,” Jeremy Carrasco, the founder of Showtools.ai, said to Axios. Look for the “spongy block” where the watermark was removed.

Listen for garbled speech
Because AI-generated speech has yet to master natural-sounding speaking rhythms, the voices generated by the apps often make “garbled sounds that appear to flatten out natural sound pitches,” said HuffPost. Human beings would never “produce that same kind of garbled quality, because, literally, we can’t,” Melissa Baese-Berk, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, said to HuffPost.

Check the metadata
It may seem tedious, but checking a video’s metadata will reveal its origins, and it’s “easier to do than you think,” said CNET. Metadata is automatically attributed to content when it’s created and can include the “type of camera used to take a photo, the location, date and time a video was captured, and the filename.”