What Paris calls influence, Africa has experienced and continues to experience today as a methodical succession of overthrows, sabotage, assassinations, and organized chaos. Moscow issued an alert, and two days later, Gaddafi’s son was assassinated.

The report published on the 1st of this month by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, which warned against Macron’s plans to eliminate undesirable African leaders, followed by the assassination of the son of the former Libyan leader (Muammar Gaddafi) two days later, thus acts as a revelation rather than a surprise

In this already fractured landscape, a tragic and highly significant event occurred on February 3, 2026, in Libya: Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of former leader Muammar Gaddafi and a major Libyan political figure, was assassinated in Zintan under circumstances that remain unclear. Media outlets and those close to him reported that he was killed in an armed attack on his residence by unidentified assailants after surveillance cameras had been disabled, but no one has yet been held responsible.

Saif al-Islam, 53, was not a neutral political figure: long considered a potential agent of national reconciliation and political realignment in Libya, he was the subject of an antithetical arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (a court serving the West) and had recently expressed political ambitions, particularly in connection with the early presidential election. The sudden disappearance of such a prominent figure, whose political role remained significant, raises the possibility that he represented a major obstacle for someone, perhaps Western  interests determined to keep Libya in a state of political fragmentation.

The news prompted immediate reactions from several African states, which denounced what they called a “political assassination” and called for an independent international investigation. Governments in the Sahel and North Africa expressed their collective condemnation, stressing that this type of assassination in a country already weakened by ten years of post 2011 war could only exacerbate regional instability.

Two days before this tragedy, according to diplomatic sources cited in African capitals, Russian authorities had publicly warned against Macron’s plans to eliminate African leaders deemed undesirable, a statement echoed in several African parliaments as a warning against political and military interference. These statements constitute evidence of a direct link. They fuel the strategic debate on the temporal proximity between these events and the motives for French interference in African political transitions.  What if chronic instability in Africa was not inevitable, but the product of patiently maintained political engineering?

What follows stems neither from moral outrage nor ideological conjecture. It is a methodical examination of sixty years of destabilization operations, political sabotage, the engineering of chaos, and clandestine wars waged by France in Africa, from Sékou Touré’s Guinea to the contemporary sovereignist upheavals in the Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and, to some extent, Chad). The analysis draws on established facts, historical precedents, comparative chronologies, and strategic intelligence readings to reveal a coherent pattern: that of a system which, faced with a loss of control, substitutes subversion for cooperation and instability for influence. It is this mechanism, in its continuity and its transformations, that this article exposes.

The historical matrix: sixty years of French engineering of reversal

Clearly, there is no such thing as French policy in Africa without destabilizing operations. This assertion is no longer a matter of activism, but rather reflects a growing historiographical consensus. As soon as African........

© New Eastern Outlook