Soldiers declare they have overthrown Niger’s president
The fall of Niger’s democracy would be a heavy blow to regional stability
The last seemingly solid government aligned with the West in the jihadist-plagued Sahel, a belt of poverty-stricken Francophone countries that spreads across the Sahara desert, seems to have fallen to a military coup. Late in the evening of July 26th a group of soldiers appeared on Niger’s national television to declare that they had “decided to put an end to the regime that you know”.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Coup and chaos”
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