The kind of third-worldist brainrot that has long been an undercurrent of America’s far-Left is having a moment.
The “Blame America First” crowd used to be confined to the fringes — coffee shop discussions of a million dead Iraqis, Jane Fonda manning a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun, DSA conference speakers deriding Barack Obama as a war criminal for taking out Based Pan-Africanist Socialist Revolutionary Gaddafi — but now it dominates the Discourse. Podcasters and newsletter writers from Left, Right, and the schizo middle draw millions of clicks by asserting that American projection of force and pursual of interest is the root cause of all the world’s ills, from Russia-Ukraine to “genocide in Gaza” to the Islamic takeover of Europe.
Sadio Camara would likely agree with some version of that anti-Western assessment if you asked him about it. You can’t, though, because he got blown up by a car bomb last month.
Camara was the Minister of Defense in the West African country of Mali until his untimely yet instructive death on April 25. It was only a few years earlier that he played a key role in overthrowing his own country’s government, kicking out the United States (and even more so the French), and entering a security partnership with Russia and its mercenaries.
Mali is part of the Sahel region of Africa, alongside Niger and Burkina Faso. The average American could be forgiven for not caring much about this part of the world, but they should at least a little: it’s rich in rare earth minerals, resources like gold and uranium, and Islamic terrorists. They also sit along key migration routes from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, which is to say that they have some bearing on how non-European Europe will continue to become in the future.
All three of those countries previously had democratic-ish governments that worked with the United States and France on counter-terrorism. You might recall the tragic ambush in Niger that killed four Green Berets (and 4 Nigeriens) in 2017. Africa has really become a hotspot for Islamic terrorist groups in recent years, and the United States had a major presence in Niger to fight them (and smaller special forces operations in Mali and Burkina Faso).
Then, in the early 2020s, they fell one-by-one to Russian-backed coups that installed military juntas and severed ties with the United States.
“Move on from the colonial past and hear the anger, the frustration, the rejection that is coming up from the African cities and countryside, and understand that this movement is inexorable,” Malian government spokesman Abdoulaye Maïga told the UN in 2022. “Your intimidations and subversive actions have only swelled the ranks of Africans concerned with preserving their dignity.”
There is a little bit of blame to be attributed to Washington, D.C., at this point in the story. Under President Joe Biden, a delegation of officials visited Niger and more or less gave the junta an ultimatum: stop cozying up to Russia and Iran and work with us instead, or else. At the time, Niger was nearing a uranium agreement with Iran. (Surely that won’t be relevant down the road!)
They promptly told the Biden administration to kick rocks and booted what remained of America’s presence from the country, including one of our most critical drone bases in the region which we used to kill terrorists.
“For Niger it was just very abrupt and very aggressive. They felt that it was the same attitude that the French had,” Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, told me. “The military junta asked them to leave.”
“Instead of presenting it as an ultimatum, they could have presented an alternative. Instead of doing a uranium deal with Iran, why don’t you do one with the United States, and you get a school program or something in Niger, something they don’t have,” Riboua said. “A lot of these countries have unemployment issues, and they’re landlocked countries, so it’s very hard for them to do trade and be integrated in the region.”
Alas, with the Western colonial powers gone, things should have been on the upswing for the Sahel. We’ve got Russia (primarily via its mercenary forces, the Wagner Group) doing security and fighting the terrorists. We’re trading with Iran and China. All is well.
Then they got mugged by reality. The Russians were killing untold numbers of civilians and still somehow managing to cede ground to the jihadists. In fact, in Burkina Faso and Mali, the Russians and government forces actually killed more civilians last year than the jihadists. The security situation was deteriorating rapidly. Then, things really came to a head in April, with the offensive that killed Camara and countless others.
The April attack even resulted in Russia’s own mini-Kabul moment, with Russian troops fleeing the region, forced to leave large amounts of weapons behind.
The Sahel juntas, just a few years after declaring themselves strong, independent, anti-Western governments that don’t need no protecting from Europe and America, found themselves being overrun by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and ISIS.
🚨Urgent – 🇧🇫 Burkina Faso
Une dissidence d’un groupe entier du JNIM a été signalée dans le nord du Burkina Faso, avec son ralliement à la branche de l’État islamique dans la province du Sahel ( ISSP)
Le nombre de combattants concernés serait important. pic.twitter.com/AXpAFcMsnS
— Sahel Alerte (@SahelAlerte) April 15, 2026
JNIM are a group of Salafi-jihadist groups, descended in part from al-Qaeda, which now operates in territory larger than every U.S. state besides Alaska, primarily in Mali and Burkina Faso. They’re the ones who rolled up to Camara’s house and detonated a car bomb. They’re probably the closest entity we’ve seen to peak ISIS since its downfall, seeing as their specific goals are to expel foreign forces and establish a caliphate under sharia law.
Of course, there is still ISIS itself, which is also active here. ISSP (Islamic State-Sahel Province) has taken over large swathes of Niger, and even launched an attack on the capital’s airport in January (which also housed some Russian mercenaries).
The JNIM/FLA coalition attacked and took control of the Malian military base in Hombori, Mopti region in central Mali this morning. pic.twitter.com/r0k9NrbSHl
— Brant (@BrantPhilip_) April 30, 2026
The Trump administration has signaled some willingness to get involved and try to rectify the situation, potentially with a mineral deal of some kind, but who knows if it will come too late. The Islamists are taking all three countries by storm now, and have killed nearly 80,000 people since 2019.
“We are victims of our wealth — the wealth that imperialists want to seize at all costs, aiming to keep us in slavery. We will secure it,” said Burkina Faso’s “Interim” President Ibrahim Traoré in 2024.
They probably wish they had stayed under the boot of Western imperialism after all.
