Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: The United States expands its joint military operations with Nigeria in the country’s northeast, Senegal’s political schism deepens after the ousted prime minister is elected parliament speaker, and the Trump administration plans to accept more white South African refugees.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: The United States expands its joint military operations with Nigeria in the country’s northeast, Senegal’s political schism deepens after the ousted prime minister is elected parliament speaker, and the Trump administration plans to accept more white South African refugees.

U.S. Takes on Nigeria’s Insurgency

In recent weeks, joint U.S.-Nigerian airstrikes have eliminated a top leader of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and killed 175 militants in Nigeria, according to statements from Washington and Abuja.

The expansion of U.S. operations in the northeast, the epicenter of Nigeria’s insurgency, has been welcomed by Nigerians and politicians fed up with insecurity. So far, the joint strikes have not led to civilian casualties, unlike Nigerian-led strikes, which frequently accidentally kill civilians.

Yet experts told Foreign Policy that Washington may find itself facing the kind of animosity it experienced in the Sahel if military operations don’t change Nigeria’s complex, decadeslong insurgency, which has metastasized in recent years into a “ransom economy” as armed groups murder and kidnap citizens across the country for profit.

For years, Abuja has battled several jihadi groups operating in northern Nigeria, including Boko Haram, which emerged as a terrorist group in 2009; the Sahelian group Lakurawa, which formed the following year; and ISWAP, which splintered from Boko Haram in 2016.

In the northwest, bandits operate from forested hideouts, engaging in mass abductions for ransom. Farther south, in the Middle Belt, nomadic Fulani herders, who are predominantly Muslim, are migrating southward due to drought in the north, leading to violent clashes with largely Christian farmers over land and water access.

Overall, Nigeria’s crisis reflects wider state failure to provide security and basic funding of public services such as electricity, water, and education.

Nigeria has consistently carried out strikes against these armed groups. Yet Ladd Serwat, the senior analyst for Africa at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), said that jihadis easily replenish their ranks.

Some of the people who join these militant groups are forced to “for their own safety, because of the absence of........

© Foreign Policy