Daily Times

In a makeshift bunker of sacks of rice beneath a tree, heavily-armed Togolese soldiers keep watch over villagers coming and going on foot or bike across the border with Burkina Faso.

Just a dried-out river bed separates the two West African countries.

In surrounding fields, peasant farmers are bent silhouettes, watering the sorghum and maize seeds sown before the arrival of the first rains.

Soon, clouds will chase away the fine dust of the harmattan, the desert wind that each year sweeps off the Sahara southwards to the coast and chokes the air.

Nothing dramatic, or so it would seem, ever happens at Yemboate, in Togo’s far north.

Yet less than 30 kilometres (19 miles) away, over the border in eastern Burkina Faso, jihadists and militia groups have imposed their own brutal law.

Those policemen, doctors and teachers who have not fled are being hunted down and butchered.

“When I was small, we spent our time swimming in the river,” says farmer Abdoulaye Mossi, leaning on his bike with a hoe, speaking to AFP before the coronavirus pandemic.

The arid channel separates his peaceful village of cob huts from a Burkinabe village on the other side.

“Fear rules today,” the farmer says.

But fear does not stop people crossing between the two countries, especially on Tuesday’s market day, when they sell crops and cattle.

“They’re never far away,” he says, of the armed movements.

“They often come to have their motorbikes repaired. They will never tell you who the jihadists are, but we know,” says Mossi, part of whose family lives in Burkina Faso.

The Togolese soldiers mount checkpoints and mobile patrols of the countless cross-border tracks through the bush that enable jihadists on motorbikes to blend into the civilian population.

Expansion south?

After the fall of Burkinabe president Blaise Compaore in 2014, Togo’s northern neighbour fell prey to the jihadist chaos that had begun in neighbouring Mali, fanned by the collapse of Libya.

Today, jihadists affiliated to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group threaten to pursue their expansion southwards in countries along the Gulf of Guinea coast — Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast, as well as Togo.

A year ago Benin witnessed the kidnapping of two French tourists and the murder of their guide in the Pendjari National Park.

In February, jihadists also attacked a police station near the border with Burkina Faso.

In Ivory Coast, jihadist gunmen attacked the Grand-Bassam beach resort in 2016, leaving 19 people dead.

Another jihadist group has been holing up in the Comoe national park in northern Ivory Coast for the past eight months after being pursued by Burkinabe troops.

The coronavirus pandemic has inspired no ceasefires. In Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the number of clashes and attacks reached unprecedented levels last year.

According to local and foreign security sources, many parts of rural Ivory Coast, Togo and Benin have seen the awakening of “sleeper cells” — people indoctrinated and trained to encourage ever more radical peaching in mosques and Koranic schools.

Togo’s fears

“The terrorist threat is real and the pressure is very strong… we feel it a little more with each day,” Togolese President Faure Gnassingbe told AFP in February, while campaigning for re-election in Dapaong, the main northern town.

Flying by helicopter from the capital Lome, 650 km to the south, the head of state touched down in what has become a “red zone” for tourists, missionaries and foreign aid personnel, whose work was cut short by a Spanish priest’s murder at a Burkinabe customs post.

Togo has been spared big attacks so far, but its territory has been infiltrated and the armed forces are racing to ready for the worst.

According to confidential military documents seen by AFP, almost 700 Togolese soldiers are deployed in the northernmost Savanes region on the border with Burkina Faso, engaged in Operation Koundjoare launched in 2018.

They keep guard at an invisible border of around 100 km, with Ghana to the west and Benin to the east.

The territory serves smugglers, highway robbers and all sorts of contraband — ivory, weapons, drugs and, above all, gold, one of the main resources of the region.