Northern Benin is fast becoming one of the most dangerous areas in the world for wildlife rangers: In late July, five rangers working for the conservation NGO African Parks were killed in an attack by militants along with seven Beninese soldiers in W National Park, which borders Burkina Faso and Niger. The incident comes just over two years after a roadside bomb ambush claimed the lives of five African Parks rangers and a French anti-poaching trainer. That attack also took place inside W, which is now a crucial front in West Africa’s struggle to contain jihadist insurgencies that began expanding across the Sahel region in 2011. W is part of the W-Arly-Pendjari Complex, a 34,000-square-kilometer (13,100-square-mile) landscape that contains some of the region’s last remaining elephants, cheetahs and lions. A sprawling mix of wooded savanna, swampy estuaries and gallery forests, W-Arly-Pendjari is one of the few remaining habitats capable of carrying sizeable populations of major fauna in West Africa. The complex lies across the borders of Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. Beginning in the late 2010s, militant groups began to entrench themselves in the latter two, drawn by a governance vacuum, the landscape’s dense forests and its lucrative trade and smuggling routes. “The jihadists are able to navigate through the park quite easily, particularly on the Burkina and Niger side,” said Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, deputy director of the International Crisis Group’s Sahel Project, and the author of a 2023 report about activity of armed groups inside W. “The Benin authorities…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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