 Anwar Bukhars, who is really sort of the father of this conference, who's been organizing it, taking the lead on it for several years now, and also my colleague Fred Wehry that worked very hard to pull this conference off. Now I think, Anwar, is this the third year running as far as I know that we have, it's the fourth actually, okay, it's the fourth year running in which we've organized a conference that brings together experts on these different parts of Africa, on the Maghreb, North Africa and the Sahel, as well as experts on terrorism to discuss the instability, internal political crises and militant rivalries that have enabled groups such as Al Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State, IS, to extend their influence in the region. Now these issues of course are important and unfortunately growing in importance all the time. We found it really fruitful to bring together these different communities of experts who don't necessarily meet all the time, especially people who work on different parts of Africa. Now this may be changing, of course, in the U.S. military, the Africa command now includes North Africa as well as the rest of the continent and this pattern is being replicated in the National Security Council, maybe it even will be in the U.S. Department of State. So maybe we're going to see people who work on Africa kind of coming together more as one community. But up till now in the academic and the think tank communities, really the people who work on the Maghreb and Sahel have been completely separate and they don't overlap that much. So we at Carnegie have found it really useful to partner with the African Peace Building Network of SSRC with their solid knowledge of the African continent, rather, to study this issue of militancy that crosses borders. The Middle East program at Carnegie hopes to bring to this our knowledge of the Maghreb and also our emphasis on governance of internal political, economic, social issues that tend to affect the climate for militancy and conflict. So, you know, unfortunately, the current political landscape in the Sahel and the Maghreb provides a solid foundation for extremist groups to embed themselves in the social fabric, which is tarnished by conflict, corruption, various forms of injustice. In my own work here at Carnegie, I work a lot on Egypt and we saw a very tragic example of this just in the past week in Egypt where local Egyptian groups that have affiliated themselves with IS are trying to exploit social polarization, cynically betting that these very bloody attacks on Egyptian Christians will sow division between them and Muslims, and particularly Islamists who have taken the brunt of human rights abuses since the military coup of 2013. I hope that bet is wrong, but it shows you how these groups are able to exploit internal vulnerabilities in these countries. Egypt's not on the agenda here today, but I hope that in our discussion of other African countries we'll be able to bring out how governance failures provide an opening for militancy and tease out some recommendations for how the people and the governments of the continent, as well as our own government here in the United States, can best address these problems. So now I would like to invite our partner in this event, Dr. Cyril Obi, who's director of the African Peace Building Network at SSRC to offer a few words of welcome. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues. My name is Cyril Obi and I lead the African Peace Building Network of the Social Science Research Council. I want to start by thanking Michelle Dunn and her colleagues, as well as Anwar Bukas, who, apart from being an associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is also a member of the advisory board of the African Peace Building Network. A little bit of background here. The African Peace Building Network was established in 2012 and is funded by the Carnegie Cooperation of New York. It sets about to support and facilitate both the production and visibility of research-based knowledge produced by African scholars based in African universities and organizations. We also hope by this process not just to facilitate the production of such high-quality knowledge, but to insert such knowledge into policy conversations and actions that are aimed towards peacebuilding in Africa. We have some of our publications outside by way of disseminating of our research findings. And another way of disseminating the kind of work that we support is by partnering with organizations within the United States, Europe, and Africa to showcase some of the work that our grantees are doing. I'm very happy that two of our former grantees from Nigeria, as well as Senegal, by way of South Africa, are here to share some of their work on this exact same theme of militancy and conflict in the Sahel and the Maghreb. One of the interesting things, and Michelle spoke about this, is the complexity of the conflicts and what I call the geography of the conflicts and how the conflict is actually moving and leading to what I call the mission of North Africa to West Africa and the Sahel. In the past, people used to talk about Sub-Saharan Africa as if there was an Africa that was not Sub-Saharan. That kind of concept is now becoming irrelevant because what we see really is that after the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in particular, that boundary between North Africa and West Africa has been erased in security terms by the migration. Interesting trends, you have a South-North migration through North Africa and you have extremist violence migrating from the North downwards to the South, south of the Sahara and what we call West Africa. This raises a lot of challenges, not just in terms of the infestation of the region with this rising conflicts and forms of extremism, but the fact that it's also been a space for contestation between al-Qaeda in the Maghreb as well as Islamic State. And it's also very interesting to see how these movements and how these trends are latching opportunistically to different contradictions and tensions that are embedded even within those countries and what people can term some of the governance deficits and longstanding grievances of marginalized peoples and minorities around that region. Having said that, there is a lot of threat and there is a lot of vulnerabilities. But I hope that in the conversations that we follow, we should also begin to speak to the resilience of the communities in some parts of West Africa and the Sahara and how they have been able to cope and the challenge that we face in terms of reconstruction and reintegration. And on that note again, I want to welcome you and to say that I really look forward to very robust discussions. We did this last year and it was a fantastic meeting and I expect no less today with a kind of galaxy of distinguished speakers that we have. I'm sure that you are all in here for a feast of ideas and a feast of solutions. Thank you very much for your attention. Yes. Thank you, Michelle, for your leadership. Thank you, Sarah, for your support. And with this, we'll start the first panel. The first panel deals with the new security dynamics linking together the Maghreb and Sahel regions. In the past, policy makers and analysts, they have tended to see or to perceive the Maghreb and the Sahel as two entities that are distinct. But this distinction now is obsolete, especially after the fall of Muhammad al-Qadhafi. So several events and several actors have pushed the two regions closer together in terms of threats, perceptions, and in terms of security concerns. So our invited experts today will help us unpack this new security interconnection between the Sahel and the Maghreb, examining the transformation of threats and insecurities. As the region is also the locus of competing zones of influence where bothering states struggle for control, it would be helpful to get an overview of the dynamics of the forms and the consequences of the rivalries and power struggles between regional powers in the contemporary Maghreb and the Sahel. So Rasmus Boster, a friend of mine, and he's a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, will start out with a broad overview of the security complexes in the Maghreb and the Sahel. He will look at the key players and the drivers of insecurity and their linkages across the border. I don't need to delve into the bio of our distinguished speaker. You have it as a on you. The second speaker would be Dalia Rahnem, joining us from Beirut. Hey, Dalia. Dalia is an Aryan fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. With her work, exam is political and extremist violence, radicalization, Islamism, and jihadism, with an emphasis on Algeria. And frankly, she's the person to go to on Algeria. She has been a great resource to me. And I read her work so avidly. Thank you, Dalia. So Dalia will drill down deeper with a more detailed discussion on Algeria and its Sahelian neighborhood. And she will also examine the cross-border jihari threats. And finally, Claire Spencer, another friend, senior research fellow over the Middle East and North Africa program and second century initiative at Chatham House. She will finish off the discussion with Zirouen on Morocco's foreign policy and role in the Sahel. And obviously each of you can touch on the extremist challenge in North Africa and the Sahel, the factors that allow extremists whether a resurgent AQIM or a retreating ISIS to find purchase in the southern border areas. And I would suggest that we keep our remarks to 10 to 12 minutes max. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And it's a pleasure to be at the Carnegie Foundation. And I'm very happy to meet both friends and hopefully common friends and colleagues here. I'll pick up immediately on this test that Anwar has given me. And I'll try to present very briefly within the 12 minutes, the limit that has been set for this intervention, three sort of interrelated arguments about the changing nature of the Indian security Sahel in Morocco. But the first argument I'm going to get around of statement is that basically that we are witnessing a large host of different types of non-state actors who together are changing the way we are seeing the connections between the security complex in Morocco to some extent to the European security complex. So we have like three different complexes in play. And the key point that I'm going to make there is to say that one of the difficulties we've had to get our heads around this is that what's really going on is non-state actors are really driving the process of expanding and executing this. Now sort of the second point I pick up on afterwards is that these changes or certain interconnections have as mentioned previously by a couple of colleagues have been triggered by the collapse of domestic order in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi. But this is the third point. They're basically caused by very different dynamics and structural conditions that are prevailed and have been for quite a while in the Sahel region combined with a juncture I could say in militancy and non-state. So these things come together to give us a broader picture hopefully of where we are with the security structuring in the Sahel Maghreb nexus. So first point here. What do I mean when I say that we are sort of witnessing the transformation of the interregional sort of security connections between Sahel Maghreb and Europe and that it's dictated primarily by non-state actors. Now one step backward is necessary here. Traditional when we speak about security complexes, the broader theoretical background is one of state-to-state relations. It's basically adopted from a we could say pretty western-oriented, western-dominated theoretical perspective looking at nation states that sort of keep each other at bay and complexes where they relate to one another. And the security complex and a regional security complex is then sort of a region where we have a large number of states who keep each other sufficiently at their toes to the extent that we cannot meaningfully separate one of them from the next. So we have to analyze their sort of security interconnections together. Now one of the problems with it when we look at what's going on right now is that it's obviously not really states we are looking at. And one of the consequences that traditionally came out of this and I think Michelle alluded to this in her introduction already is that when we looked from North Africa towards the rest of Africa and I'm a North African scholar so you'll excuse me on my sort of flickering knowledge of the Sahel. But when we looked at that region down southwards we saw in security complex terms sort of beyond Sahel towards East Africa, towards West Africa and obviously with South Africa as well. So the Sahel was seen as a sort of an insulator area or a buffer zone between three other sort of security complexes. The North African well recognized and I think Claire and perhaps Daria will come into that one and look about structured around the western Sahara conflict primarily between Algeria, Morocco etc and then we'd have the other sort of security complexes and the Sahel region was somewhere in between a couple of states that were not sufficiently strong as states to really project themselves beyond their borders and military terms and then security terms. So we've seen us like a kind of a non-region in security terms. Now that obviously has come to a change and it's not as such new over the last let's say five years that has been pretty clear to the large majority of observers and even policy makers that we have to look at the Sahel in different terms. As some sort of region that is connected in security terms what we are still witnessing of course is not really states being capable of project themselves in terms of security and threats and military capabilities etc but we are seeing these non-state actors and the point that comes across here is that we need to then understand the expansion and the creation of a security complex in the Sahel as something driven not by this traditional perspective but as something that sort of actually pushes our theoretical apparatus a bit backwards and then it has consequences also for the way that we can even speak about and potentially also long term obviously act on security. One thing that has been sort of concomitant so a parallel process with this rather theoretical way of conceptualizing the Sahel as a non-security entity is that it's exactly this other point alluded to by some of the previous speakers that in policy terms and also obviously in broader academic and think tank milliers we didn't really see these areas as interconnected. Now what has come across is that with the groups like AQIM, Mujau and Sadi Din etc we saw groups whose composition, whose reach and whose area of recruitment and mobilization was regional stretching beyond Mali into both Niger Algeria, Libya etc so we had groups that obviously for tens for at least for a decade and a half have been regionalized and it is this thing that we are trying to grab and come across and actually to push the necessary consequences in terms of the policy mechanism and institutionalizations of how we make politics. We just heard that here in the States the larger security apparatus is now actually acting on this and bringing together North Africa within the African division. Some of the same process are observable although maybe not as far pushed in a couple of the European countries that I'm used to engage with and I can see a push for this but I can also see tremendous entrenched challenges with this in the terms of how do we think and how are we actually capable of projecting our own knowledge from one region into another one. We're currently running a program at the GIS that looks a little bit like what you're doing here where we're trying to put together experts that come from different regions. What are the key issues? I mean it's down to the basics, the language with the sort of theoretical ideas about what really drives radicalization. It is economy which is a pretty sort of outspoken way of looking at mobilization patterns in the Sahel. Or is it rather political inclusion, exclusion mechanism as alluded to by Michel which is the way we are mainly used to see it in a North African perspective. So we face a lot of challenges in the academic community and a lot of institutional traction within the policy making community to get across this. So what I'm just going to sort of briefly get to with my first point is to say that so we have seen this underground empirical development that pushes all of our sort of entrenched institutional ways of thinking about and acting politically in this particular region. And I cherish that we are sitting here and trying to sort of get across this all by the same time recognizing the tremendous challenges we are actually facing. I have never set my feet for instance in chat but I've spent quite a lot of time in North Africa and I think it's vice versa and these meetings are tremendously important for us to try to grasp what are the sort of the local mechanisms and mechanisms of that are the countries. Currently I'm trying to sort of push myself to become increasingly embedded in getting some knowledge about the Sahel in order to sort of get my head around how these interconnections between that are asymmetrical on a theoretical level. So we have states vis-à-vis non-state actors but also disjunctured in the institutional and in academic terms. But that was just the first point basically to say that we have to go to the nature of the way that the security complex is changing tremendous challenge on both a theoretical and a let's say action oriented policy agenda. Now when I said immediately or initially that it's also something that touches upon Europe, it is because that while we have now already acknowledged that we're seeing Macrep and Sahel being pushed together as a part of this sort of non-state actor proliferation, we have perhaps been less aware until very recently that there's also that non-state actors were capable to do more than just constitute a new so to say in security terms region, the Sahel, but that region could also spill into not just one but actually two regions via different types of non-state actors. We've seen the North African states being primarily preoccupied with the security issue of it, terrorism threats as they call it, merging out of Mali and via Niger into Libya and from there further into the North African states. And we've seen on the other hand the European countries being tremendously preoccupied with the stability nexus coming out of the migration problem in sort of post-Syrian collapse situation. So we have different sorts of non-state actors that pushes and expands our way to see how security complex is actually pushing towards one another and potentially merging and at least constituting themselves as sort of the key, we can say, triggers for the new constitution of security dynamics in this region. Now my second point and I'll just have to check how much time I have. I only have a couple of minutes left for my second and third point. I'll try to wrap them up quickly. The second and third point here is that this process was obviously triggered by the collapse of the Gaddafi's regime and it was alluded to a couple of times here that when Gaddafi's regime was sort of brought down in combination of mobilization from below, so to say, and the NATO campaign, we saw the opening of what some would term a tunnel or a corridor of instability. It had different names depending on who we were talking to. These non-state actors that were already present in the Sahel region all of a sudden could sort of relatively unhindered find their ways into the Macrep and push the security sort of apparatuses in the Macrep and further on sort of facilitate the migration flows further on into Europe thereby bringing the three, we could say the three security complexes into a much, much closer relation than what we've seen before. Now, the backdrop of this was that the actors had been there for quite a while. We know that both the Libyan Secret Services, the Algerian Secret Services had actually actively worked to push their sort of rebels from the 1990s. Jihad is another group down into the Sahel and we also know that quite a couple of the Sahel countries did not have the capabilities to push them out. And what happens with the French intervention after the fall of Qaddafi and the sort of collapse of Mali was the French then pushed them back up into North Africa thus and the key event that we are all sort of looking at back in 13 was obviously the Inaminas attack in Algeria where rebels that had originally back from the late 1990s been pushed down into Mali were then pushed up through Libya back into Algeria. So we have this sort of ongoing circle of these groups that could then remanifest themselves and for anybody who had had any doubts about it, I think that event, not just in the composition of the actors that were brightly regional, those people who took part in the event, but itself its way of being generated by processes that brought European powers together with local powers and pushed non-state actors back up into the North African security complex and thereby triggered an entire row of security actions by the Algerians, by the Tunisians, and by the Egyptians even later on. I think that is what shows us that event epitomizes exactly these dynamics, how they sort of bring these different players together, everything, all of that being driven by sort of non-state actors who then to some extent we could say set the agenda for how the security prisms and the security nexus is developing right now. And this is what we in the third last point I'm going to make is that while this is obviously something that was triggered by the opening of Libya, and one key policy pointer coming out of that is to handle Libya obviously. If Libya can be handled then Europe would at least be able to sort of lift itself out of the nexus and that's sort of a key thinking, sort of floating in certain European foreign policy environments right now that if Libya could be blocked, stopped, handled both on the migration but also on the terrorism prism seen primarily by the French, then sort of the European security could fall back and be less threatened by what is going on. But on the other hand, and this is the last point, we know that these things are long entrenched and there's another far more developmental and sort of peacemaking stabilization and classic development aid policy agenda that comes out of this, that this is the instability or the ability for militant groups to actually proliferate in this region in the Sahel region obviously boils down to the inability of the states and the entrenched inability of them to provide services to present themselves as legitimate political actors, whether we look at Mali, or the other Sahel states, there's a clear and a long term question about sort of the legitimacy and the capability of the post-colonial states there, which is I would say comparable to, but it seems with my comparable capability, far stronger in its inability, I may put it that way, than what we're used to, what I'm used to looking at in the North African context, where states are entrenched and for a long while criminal in their sort of government structures, but as states may have some larger sort of level of acceptance as state entities, there are a lot of controversy that people will to a large extent identify with the state structures and this obviously has varying degrees, but it seems to me, and this may be a point of discussion, that the state itself is even more questionable in quite a couple of these Sahel areas, that calls for sort of the last sort of policy point of them, when we're really looking at courses for this radicalization, obviously there's a deep structural sort of undercurrent here that comes together with a period of conjunction in North African politics, which is the conjunction created by what Michel alluded to, the authoritarian sort of relapse in Arab and Middle Eastern politics, where we see authoritarian regimes reinstall themselves. Now what does that sort of as conclusion, where does that leave us? It leaves us obviously with a place where we theoretically have to reconsider how do we see security complexes expanding and how do we see, how do we even understand their ability to form and change, and it leaves us in a academic place where we would have to as we could say policy community bring down these long entrenched distinct ways of theorizing radicalization, of understanding the processes of how extremism is generated and what we can do about it, and I think there are some clear challenges and distinct ways of thinking about this in the two regions that we're talking about here, and I'd say thirdly this, and there it's good to hear that the process is already going, there's a clear call, and I see that in a European context as well, a call for bringing down the walls that have been erected over quite a couple of decades within the policy community, and I speak here about the political institutions between North Africa as being a security complex, looking northwards towards Europe or even being linked up with the sort of the Maeshraic area, the the Vanta area and the Gulf, and understanding that these interconnections are much deeper and that the old divisions are exactly as Cyril said in the beginning, these obsolete divisions that we have to simply come across and come beyond in our way of understanding how security changes itself in the nexus right now. I'll keep my comments on that. All right. Thank you very much. All right, so we'll go next to Davia from Beirut. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay, so I am going to discuss today Algeria and its south, and I have to confess that I am happy to talk about something different than President Boutfleka's health. So the south of Algeria is a vast area and represent 85% of the national territory. This region even during the Black Decade or the Algerian Civil War was a pretty quiet and calm region even at the paroxysm of jihadist violence in Algeria. The south was immune against jihadist activities. Actually the Algerian authorities opened the internment camps in the south during the 90s, but today the situation of the south is a bit different. Today the south is a source of concern for the Algerian authorities and the south might represent the Achilleas hill of Algeria's stability. Why? For two reasons that I am going to discuss here. The first reason is because of the regional instability and the second reason sorry, it's because of the emerging if I may say awakening of the political consciousness of the populations of the south. So to start with the regional instability just as a reminder Algeria shares its border with seven other countries which represent 6,000 kilometers to protect and this is a lot of borders to protect. In April 2012 the movement of Onnes and jihad in West Africa, well known as the Mujaw attacked Jandam Gheba Barak in Tamil Rasat and in the same year seven Algerian diplomats were kidnapped in Gao. Yet it is only with the attack of January 16, 2013, the attack of Ain Aminas by MBM, Mokhtar Bel Mokhtar and his international commando, that the Algerian authorities seemed to finally understand the limits and the weakness of their thinking and of their counter-terrorist tactic. This attack showed that the regional instability in neighboring countries can indeed threaten the national security and the national interest. The cause in Libya as mentioned by Rasmus showed also that Algeria cannot be immune. It showed that the security vacuum in post-Qaddafi Libya allowed Aqeem for instance to refill its stock in weapons, in manpower but it allowed it also to open its training cup in the south of the country in the region of Oubari where Mokhtar Bel Mokhtar is actually believed to have trained his international commando. So the attack of the complex showed in a way the transactional nature of the security threat posed by army to jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda but in a nutshell the attack of Ain Aminas showed that the security threat changed. It showed not only its nature which is more transactional but it showed also the high degree of adaptation and resilience of jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. We are talking about a group that has been here since the 90s it doesn't matter what it was called back then GSPC but it is still a group that came from the ashes of the GSPC. So it showed high capabilities of resilience and adaptation and it showed also its capacities to adapt to regional realities and to how for instance they were capable to build and to strengthen their networks within tribal tribes and local communities in the Sahar region and how in a nutshell they took advantage of the failed state within the Sahar region and the big ungoverned spaces. As a result the Sahelian Saara space became synonymous of marginalization, extreme poverty and rebellion. It should be noted that it is very hard when we talk about this jihadist group to map them but also to show exactly the networks because there is an intermix between jihadist organization, between local communities, between state officials and this is all possible because of a high degree of corruption within the Sahelian state. So for Algeria the other threat is coming from decisionist movement. The fall of Al-Qaddafi allowed Aqeem as I said to have more troops and many Tuaregs are believed to have who were supported back then by Al-Qaddafi to have you know joined Aqeem in Mali and Niger and they were highly equipped but also highly trained. Many of them are fighting with Al-Qaddafi today and for Algeria the decisionist request is a threat also for national security because in Algeria we have also Tuareg communities. So Algeria fears in a way the contamination of the decisionist claim. Of course the country has been integrating its Tuareg communities since the independence in 1962. They are represented in parliament they are represented also in the affluent structure but yet there is a fear of contamination and this is why the country is playing a very important role and has been playing an important role since the 90s to find and to mediate between the central state and the Tuareg. But the weakness of neighboring countries is today problematic for Algeria and what is more problematic is the old Algerian doctrine of non-intervention. So non-intervention is a doctrine that is still you know very important for the Algerian authorities but today it is no longer possible to non-intervene within this region. So to mitigate the dilemma the security dilemma and answer to the new transnational transregional threat the Algerian authorities took action. They took action on the national level but also on the regional level. So on the regional level the Algerian authorities are trying to cooperate more with their Sahelian neighbors but there is still a lack of trust unfortunately. There is also the feud with the Moroccan neighbor that is not helping the cooperation. Yet the Algerian state is cooperating with the Malian. They are also training the Tunisian so they have been doing efforts in cooperation. They also initiated two initiatives such as the SEMOC and the Union de la Fusion in Tamil Nadu. But yes there is a lack of trust between all the Sahelian state. There is also lack of financial and logistical means. On the national level Algerian authorities tried to boost their defensive capacities so they invested heavily in the training of the security forces, the modernization of the equipment. The army is more professional today. It is also more equipped. It is younger and it is also feminized if I may say. As women has been integrated within the rank. In a nutshell the PNA has great operational efficiency because it is spent on personnel as much as in equipment. Algeria has been also trying to beef up its border with the Tunisian neighbor Libyan and the Malian neighbor. The PNA is backed in its counter-terrorism tactics with different other corps such as the Special Forces, the Paracomando, the Border Guard, the National Army, and of course the former DRS. The second reason that makes the South a source of concern for the Algerian government is as I said the anger, resentment and frustration that is growing year after year from the South-Earth population. Of course I think all of you remember what happened in Gardaya recently there was riots in Gardaya. There was clashes between Sunni Arabs and Berber minority. Many so these riots are being, you know, ethnical problems. I don't believe so. I think the problems were more socio-economic than ethnic issues. There was also ecological protest in Ainsaleh against the shale gas. And finally there was protest in Wargla against what the inhabitants saw as a neglect from the central authorities. So in short the southern population sees that the economy, the national economy does not match the growth of the hydrocarbon industry. So you know there is high rates of employment in the southern region especially among youth people. There is a short age in land but also in housing. There is high utility prices, cost of living and so on and so forth. So right now, until now, sorry, the authorities managed to keep a lead on violent incidents but the question is still when? Especially that the probability that the government will promote development in the near future is not likely to happen because of the drop in oil prices and the Algeria's revenues dwindle with the fall of oil prices. So the level of violence might escalate in the south part of Algeria. Of course even if the state and the army retain a strong presence in the region, it is likely that the de Hades that are operating within the region will take advantage of the socio-economic condition, will take advantage of the corruption, will take advantage of the bad governance and of the rising tension to gain local support and recruits. Let us for instance keep in mind that Muhtar is a native from Ghardaya. He knows very well the region, he knows the south and he used that knowledge to you know move and build his network but also to perpetrate the attack of Ain Aminas and actually there is suggestions that he had help from local communities. So to end I will just say that the south as I said it at the beginning might constitute the Akaliya's hill, Lutalo-Dashil of stability in Algeria. As for the Sahar region I believe that we will continue unfortunately and this is very pessimistic but I'm sorry for my pessimism. But I think I believe that we will continue to hear about the jihadist attacks coming from the Muja'u Ansar al-Din, Al-Qaeda, Akim and so on and so forth and other jihadist group in the Sahel as long as we continue to have fragile states in which the social construct broke or is really going to break between the local population and the central government. Let us keep in mind that jihadism offer grab and go solutions for very complex problems. It is an egalitarian employer that offers a broader community, a glorious cause and a thrilling adventure for many people and youth within the Sahel and within the south of Algeria. Thank you. Thank you very much. Sorry Dalia. Alright we'll finish off with Claire. Okay, well I'd like to start by thanking you Anwar and colleagues here in Carnegie and also the African Peace Building Network for this opportunity and as the previous speakers have said it's a very complex area to grasp if those of us who are studying bits of it have actually are more rooted as in my case I look particularly at European relations with North Africa European policy and it was from that starting point I'll get on to Moroccans foreign policy within this context but actually from that starting point of reminding everybody that the nexus, the security nexus also now heavily involves outside players amongst whom the European Union as a set of institutions but also individual nations from within Europe and of course first and foremost as has already been mentioned is the French military presence which has been there since the end of the very end of 2012 in Mali precisely because some of those jihadist networks Al Qaeda and the Islamic Migreb, Mojow and others until then had actually started occupying territory for the first time in Northern Mali the French have succeeded in recent years in if you like removing the control of those organizations over civilian population in Northern Mali but they haven't got rid of them and since 2015 when the Algerians oversaw and facilitated a peace and reconciliation process in Mali very little mileage has been made in fact just over the last week various UN spokespeople have been saying that actually there's an enormous urgency to deal with this and the internal dynamics of Mali are such that you have ethnic divisions so the Tuareg insurgency which kicked all this off in Northern Mali and I'm simplifying immensely if there's any social anthropologists here but it's an ethnic division between the capital based further to the southwest southwest in Niger which is more of a sub-Saharan complex and the Tuareg which is more part of the Saharan and Tuareg networks further north including into Algeria as Dalia said that is causing the biggest tensions and can you really as the question has already been posed count on Mali acting as an integrated state in future and yet it is the hub and the main HQ if you like of the major terrorist and extremist groups within the region and if I will move on eventually to Morocco but Morocco if you like is slightly outside the existing nexus if you think of the start of the crisis being Libya to the northeast and Libya is still as we'll hear this afternoon ungoverned territory in many ways going diagonally down through southern Algeria through northern Niger into Mali that is really where the real tensions are and these correspond to trafficking networks of all kinds so yes there's terrorism yes there are our militias going backwards and forwards as we saw as Dalia mentioned in the meaningless attack the group of over 30 militants managed to move all the way and gathered themselves collect themselves together in Libya just across the border from Algeria but evidence afterwards suggested many of them came all the way from Mali the Belmokhtai himself wasn't present at the attack but it certainly members of his group were engaged in moving all the way from Mali through southern Niger perhaps in and out of southern Algeria up into Libya now I haven't counted the kilometers involved in this but it's an extremely long distance for four or five armed vehicles which is what eventually emerge across the border from Libya into Algeria to traverse without being spotted by anyone and don't forget there's a US drone base in Niger which didn't see them at all I don't think in Venice it was fully operational at that stage but I remember reading an account of a US base there saying you know trying to track these guys down as they move is like looking through a straw you know the different the idea that with satellite technology you can actually see who's going where it's still enormously difficult these groups are extremely skilled at moving by night and then covering their vehicles with sand during the day hiding themselves and yes they have the complicity of local people because one of the aspects I think we have to consider and we've mentioned many topics is to think of these highly skilled highly trained out but it's not just as ideological jihadism and innocence but also as a kind of mafia this is a trafficking network which again recently we've seen cases in Mali of kidnappings of local NGO workers in this case most recently it's been a Colombian numb who has disappeared since February and there's no trace of her and there was kidnapping this had happened in the past largely for money now the two nations that actually openly refused to pay money for hostages of the UK and the US but there's been an awful lot in recent years of old French nationals who have been kidnapped and even though in public President Hollande has denied that anything is paid alongside the Italians and others there was some Italian aid workers who actually kidnapped from the west of Sahara or at least because the tinders camps they were working at inside the refugee camps for the Saharan's inside the Algeria border it is well known that large sums of money have been paid to these outfits so if you combine that with another headache from European Union which is coming off the supply of Latin American drugs which are flying into west Africa and then joining in and moving down these networks you have a complexity of challenges which are very wide-ranging because you've got to cut off this network at critical points with very local dynamics which need also to be explored and here the social anthropologists I mentioned earlier really need to be part of the equation because you really need to know the local dynamics particularly in Mali but also in Niger and elsewhere as to why people are affiliating to one organisation or not is it out of choice or they have no choice and what would they come up with it really is a question of involving local people to come up with their own solutions which can be very local but they also have dimensions further afield and well up into the kind of strategies such as the security strategy which the European Union has put together for this region since 2008 and regrettably there is something wrong with the application of these strategies because I'll read out what the principles of the latest EU strategy for security and development in the Sahel Reads ads number one security and development cannot be separated well I think you know this the problem is how do you go about doing this this is one of these endless conundrums that is enough money really being put into the right kind of development by the right kind of people and as I said I think it requires a lot more local involvement than international involvement particularly if international NGO workers are those who have been kidnapped for money that seems to be the case anytime there is some kind of externally funded development activity which requires foreign workers those foreign workers are directly at risk of contributing through being kidnapped not their fault to the funds which funds al-Qaeda and islamic migrate and others it's a business the second requirement is close to regional cooperation it's another area in which Africa particularly we're looking at the US side of the equation has been involved for years the idea there's a new plan afoot for the G5 as it's called which is Mali Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, the fifth and now they've signed yes another agreement but here we are since 2008 another eight nine years they are agreeing to being trained and actually operating together in the region because as we said it's a borderless region you've got to get the national security army and police forces across the region working together but we've seen in the past an awful lot of money particularly from Africa has gone into this kind of region training activity and the forces in question melt away when the needs is become urgent the same is true I think of the Africa sorry the Algerian led monitoring base that was set up in that it was supposed to be a monitoring and cooperation base joint military command centre that's right in those April 2010 well that base which was based in Tamagrasis in southern Algeria was nowhere to be seen when the Naminas attack took place because obviously taking place on Algerian national territory the Algerians said this is our business we're not going to have all these others engaged I think they didn't even think about it they didn't think about the big conventions of the time of their sort of counter attack if you like we're trying to regain control over the Naminas gas plant so all these areas have been tried before and they reappear time and time again in policy documents the EU claims to have an important role to play but the reality in the region is that it's individual European states France with its 4,000 troops Germany involved seeing the tour of the region frustrated in the case of Algeria because she didn't actually go there but she could actually have spoken in person to members of the Algerian government about the intense cooperation there is now between German companies which are providing everything from armoured vehicles to multi-purpose vehicles which are being assembled within Algeria and other states they're also cooperating very closely as are the French as indeed are the British with the Tunisian authorities and the emphasis there isn't an integrated security and development nexus it's very much security it is hard end security policing there are more drone and radar stations communication satellites I think is something the Germans have been supplying to the region it's all about monitoring and stopping people moving around the region as much as possible to prevent migration coming into illegal migration into Europe as it is to combat the terrorist threat and yes there is more concern now because of talk of there being an ISIS in the greater Sahara being formed within this nexus of interlink terrorist groups within northern Mali which suggests that more emphasis needs to be put on finding a tenable and sustainable solution which includes development and economics of northern Mali if that is now going to be the new HQ I mean it already is for Al Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb with links to into Boko Haram in west Africa as well so these things go further south but if the IS if the so-called Islamic state have been displaced from Libya and decide they want to set up in northern Mali to what extent is there going to be more rivalry between these groups I mean one of the dynamics which may be unleashed is that Al Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb and their cozy associates will not want to see anybody from Islamic state turning up in northern Mali so the interfighting may actually solve some of the problem if it doesn't actually resolve the issue altogether so I think this is the area we need to think very carefully about and we're thinking about policy recommendations it's not enough to enhance a European commission led a commission within the European Union is the funding body for development without clear links into what individual European states I haven't even mentioned Spain and which I'll get onto because they're cooperating very closely with Morocco but the Italians each state including within Libya as we will see not only have their own national policies towards these conflicts but actually in many cases are on opposing sides are as much national in terms of France for example they have a big interest in maintaining stability and security in Asia because that's where they extract their uranium for their nuclear energy plants within France this is a strategic concern for France and its energy production as much as it is the security response on behalf of the local populations and I think we really need to sort of hone in on the contradictions in some of these policies because in many cases the security first the policing first approach where most of the money and the cooperation is going into that sector is actually to the detriment of the development effort which is also going on in parallel but gets given second place because having strong central states where you can cooperate with people particularly in area where they're imploding a very fragile states is actually reinforcing this authoritarian tendency we've talked about before. So where is Morocco in all this? Well if we're asking what is the key issue of Moroccan foreign policy it is first and foremost and almost first foremost and last the western Sahara it is recognition of the western Sahara the southern provinces as the Moroccans refer to it as being an integral part of the sovereign states of Morocco and there is room I have argued myself there's room for a certain amount of creativity because since the Moroccan constitution the new constitution was adopted in 2011 there are proposals which are still being worked out for devolved powers, autonomous regions within Morocco of which the western Sahara could be one they have also put together a lot of funding plans, there's more money and investment going into the western Sahara again development aid for employment but also very much security because one area they really do not want to see or anybody particularly wants to see infected by the long arm of Al Qaeda in the region is the western Sahara and so far touch with the Moroccans have been successful in doing that but in terms of resolving the conflict with no process, nominal virtual whatever it is under UN auspices of self-determination for the people in the region internationally even though Morocco in the past and UN Security Council has had strong support sometimes mitigated with demands for more human rights observance but strong support of the US and France it is not in my estimation going to get an easy support from the United Kingdom partly because the UK also has territories that it doesn't want to see such as the Falklands and now increasingly in the context of Brexit Gibraltar that does not want to see these territories currently under British sovereignty extracted without some kind of form of self-determination so that principle that you ask the peoples, the indigenous peoples of the region what they want to see is I won't say sacrosanct but it's going to take a lot to move out of the way so an alternative proposal for well how do we get out of this bind is some kind of negotiated settlement which has floated with the Algerians but that has never gone anywhere because what's in it for the Algerians the Algerians are very happy to sit on the principle of self-determination and throw the ball back into the Moroccans court what Morocco has successfully succeeded in doing in recent months after I think it's 33 years absence is regaining its place in the African Union which it left out of protest of the African what was then the colonization of African Union's recognition of the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic which is the government in exile of the Saharans whose armed wing is called the Polisario you've doubt this heard all about them they themselves have always conducted fairly successful lobbying campaigns and even though they clearly are not on a winning ticket certainly militarily they're no match against the Moroccans and even though occasionally they say they're going to take up arms again no one has fought for at least a decade 15 years over the Western Sahara they have a very strong support amongst lobbies particularly in Scandinavia even the head of the Labour Party currently in the UK has been a strong supporter of independence for the Western Sahara but they haven't really gained traction anywhere but negotiating a settlement between the Moroccan Algeria is still a non-starter for reasons we can discuss further but there's a very strong rivalry between these two states and there is nothing it seems to me I say this to the Moroccans what is in it for the Algerians to actually see place particularly since the Algerians were part of a small group of states including South Africa who were trying to prevent Morocco regaining its seat in the African Union now one of the reasons that Morocco is there is that if it cannot because Algeria is its neighbouring state engage in more regional integration horizontally across the Maghreb because Algeria is the block for integration of markets and greater trading opportunities which is still very low across the Maghreb then it's invested and it's had a strategy over the last decade of investing very strongly particularly in Francophone West Africa in the banking sector insurance there is a presence of a lot of Moroccan companies now private sector but heavily backed by the palace it's the king who has with almost indefatigably pursued this strategy over the last so many years I forget there are hundreds of accords have now been signed on all sorts of areas and it is a way of projecting Morocco's future its economic future into Africa in a way that it is hoping will appeal to Europe because it's there's a kind of north south corridor which could also benefit but in security terms because of the tensions with Algeria it's not been involved directly in for example Algeria is responsible for brokering these so far not successful but anyway it's on the table peace and reconciliation deal within Mali so Morocco has actually acted to secure its own borders and it has worked very hard and successfully to portray itself as stable safe and secure and in most European Union assessments of Morocco they will see you know when they're surveying the whole region Morocco is the stable entity in the region it's securing its own borders it is cooperating much more than other states in the region over the migration issue in helping secure not always successfully the border between the Spanish enclaves Souta Malia particularly Malia in northern Morocco from migrants, sub-Saharan migrants who are traversing, I'm nearly finishing, traversing Morocco and trying to get over the fence which I think about 500 of them did very successfully over the last few weeks and once they're in Malia they're effectively in the European Union they're in Spanish territory so then they can claim asylum or whatever to continue their path into the rest of Europe. But I don't know if there's much more to be said about Morocco in that it's playing the role very much of being the good friend of the European Union occasionally there are arguments as there is at the moment over fishing accord because the European Parliament asked the European court system to condemn the fact that Morocco is claiming fish caught off the Western Sahara as Moroccan and of course the Western Sahara is still untested but most of the time the Moroccans despite the lack of direct cooperation or the force in the foreseeable future with the Algerians are trying to act at least as a stabilizing force in other areas of West Africa by stabilizing their own southern borders and investing in places like Mauritania for example which is one of the weaker states in the region to stabilize in a north south dimension their hinterland if you like alright thank you very much alright so before I open it up to the plenary I mean Rasmus you talked about the complex you know security complex interlinkages I mean how they form how they change and how they expand you also stated that causes obviously are structural but the issue is still you know how do we hold the Jihadist cross border spread in what I think crisis group called Jihad sans frontières I mean without frontiers right we saw the French military intervention we saw the deployment of UN peacekeepers but these violent extremists are still making inroads into other Sahelian you know countries I mean violent extremists they have attacked bases in central and northern Mali in Burkina Faso as you know in Ivory Coast but at the heart of the Sahel stability remains you know Mali's long running crisis and we have seen and we still see you know widening cracks in Mali's you know peace process so how do you fix that I mean all of you depicted the problems rightly so that they are regional in nature right so they require a regional response right but as Claire described the international response is incoherence is contradictory the regional response is hampered by the rivalry between Morocco and Algeria so next Algeria has played you know important roles in the political and security crises in the Sahel and also in Tunisia and in Libya but for Algeria I mean to fulfill its self assigned role as that regional stability broker you know it has necessarily you know to improve engagement with potential partners it can't do it by itself right and potential partners here you know includes Morocco for example another one it has a sewage fears that some have you know in the Sahel about the fact that Algeria seeks regional hegemony at others expense so how do you resolve that to I said Algeria played an important role there is no doubt about it in Libya, in Tunisia, in Mali and it should be commanded for that but the credibility of Algeria's role you know rests not just on its ability to project power and influence but also on its ability to deliver right deals and one of the criticism is that Algeria is driven by short term gain at the expense of long term efforts to build sustainable efforts, peace efforts look at what's happening with the Mali deal so you know how do you resolve that I think these are just for the all three of you and then I'll open it up to the audience should I start out with a couple of comments I think just to start exactly where you started with the question of how do we really fancy or imagine some sort of response to the extremism challenge or whatever we want to call it jihadism, militancy what seems to be coming across from a couple of these meetings, these kind of meetings I've been in is that we have very different drivers and conditionalities for the mobilization jihadism and militances in these two regions and some of them are over that obviously there's a shared ideological framework of anti-imperialism sort of mixing with the local dissentments of what's going on but that apart there seems to be as I briefly mentioned right before when I'm speaking to people who are the real experts, the social anthropologists that Claire referred to a couple of times they're pretty sort of the large majority of them at least that I meet with have a tendency to say that in the Sahel region this is really not my sort of expertise there's a strong sort of economic part to it, there's a strong part that is linked to alienation vis-à-vis the state agents in itself, I mean even a police officer is somebody who extracts you etc, some of that we know in a North African context that the regimes are seen as predatory in character to some extent in Algeria, relatively much in Morocco less so Tunisia kind of another nexus and in Egypt right now the regime is obviously criminal for some parts of the population and that's the sort of part of it we know that there are these resentment towards the way that governance is being handled and unfolded but I think that's the economic side to it, the sort of the economic networks of criminal activities and so on and so forth is relatively unknown from a North African perspective so one of the things that I find challenging here is to bring together or let's say put it in another way the response seems to be local to some extent that there is no sort of one side fits at all and we all know that but it comes down to the fact that we have a conjunction right now for authoritarian restoration in North Africa which even includes Tunisia, I mean all these countries have a pushback on civil liberties and governance norms and that is to some extent difference from what we're seeing in this as far as I understand that part of the region it's not that we had a big mobilization in 2011 and pushback on a large number of authoritarian practices and we've seen that come back since 2013 sort of intensely ten times as many political prisoners in Egypt at least than what we had under Mubarak today 60,000 conservative numbers etc and that obviously is a part of the way that we understand radicalization processes in South Africa it doesn't seem to be the exact same thing that is going on there seem to be a deeper and here I'm inviting my colleagues from the Sahel expertise to begin as well later in the session but there seem to be other kinds of mobilization patterns at play that we have to think into these regional responses and why is that so important it's important exactly because with the collapse of Libya and the subsequent collapse of Mali that quite a couple of these people here already spoke about the colleagues I mean an integration of these two processes so people the jihadists in one part of the in one region responding to certain political grievances in the North African context may actually become active in mobilizing along more criminal patterns in the Sahel region and vice versa so we're seeing the full month here so to say of recruitment pattern unfolded right now and that means that the responses obviously has to be equally equal and it's no shorter than that the response I would say that's the first remark to you well I think that's, well do you want to go to Dali? I think Rasmus has covered the complexity of this it's both local and regional but I think one of the problems from the outside is that we keep insisting on trying these top down measures with working with those regional governments however weak they are as in Mali to actually impose a top down solution when if you look at the history of the conflict in Mali it was the failure of the Bamako government actually to implement a previous Algiers agreement on peace and reconciliation that the government of the day reneged on the promises made to the Tuareg that actually kicked all this off in the first place so I think it's easy to say in principle what needs to happen very difficult to say in practice but as much emphasis must be placed on what incentivize everyone within this region to do what they're doing and I would say Rasmus when you refer to radicalization I think very few of the people who are actually pulled into some of these networks are actually being radicalized they are actually just following the mafia chiefs of the day into the networks that will ensure their survival you know some of these trafficking networks the criminal Belmokhtar used to be called Mr. Malboor because his business was trafficking cigarettes around the region well we have to look in a very calm sort of way and say well actually is trafficking cigarettes really threatening the security of anybody very much no not necessarily it is only when it gets linked up to these more dangerous actors so what do we do to actually rest back you know the cigarette works and actually put it back into the hands of the people who used to run it before you've got no more interest in just earning money you know it's when the criminality of this verges into something which becomes much bigger much wealthier I mean the reason Al Qaeda and Islamic Migreb which was originally operating out of Algeria migrated down to this region is it could make itself very wealthy very quickly and it's because of the ransom paying for kidnapping you know that accumulated wealth which in turn allowed them to buy into buy weapons and control some of the networks including the human trafficking which is the biggest headache obviously as long with the arms trafficking for the Europeans because you know these human traffickers operates up to Libya now and into European numbers that we find difficult to control so I think it's breaking down assumptions about who's doing what we tend from the outside to say the worst thing happening anywhere is jihadism and ideological you know terrorism that is the worst thing happening actually if we're looking at some of these contexts that may not be in overall terms the worst things happening it is the destruction of local communities of the local ability of those even though showing some resilience actually to sustain that resilience over a longer term and find ways of avoiding being captured by these very happy you know for want of a better phrase I will just continue on this point and then answer the question about Algeria foreign policy you know I think the solution in the southern of Algeria but also in the Sahar region cannot be only military because the problem is not a security problem but as Rasmus and Claire said it is a development problem sorry today the fact is that a group such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is that the group is rooted within the social and economic fabric of some tribes and local communities the best example about that is how the leadership of Al Qaeda was smart enough to realize that in order to have the support of the local communities they needed to use marriage and kinship and the best example of that is again MBM when he left Algeria and went to Mali he found the best way to enter the local communities it was marriage so he married three times actually he married the first time with a woman from the community of and then he married another woman from the community of and then he married a third woman who was a Tunisian woman so not only marriage and kinship protected him but it helped him build his network but also marriage is a great antidote for defection because you know in the culture of these tribes the protection extend to the people to whom you married so not only he was protected by the tribes but he was protected by the allies of the tribe another thing is that as I said they are also rooted in the economic fabric so this lead us again to the radicalization the violent radicalization problem it doesn't stem in my opinion from the ideological you know conviction as much as it stems from socio-economic problems today there is communities that support Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is seen as a generous provider there is for instance tiny example that shows that for instance when Al Qaeda took certain part of Mali the group because of its financial ease was capable to offer in a country in which the minimum wage is dollars to offers the youth who are capable to give him information to provide him with information about the minusma the minusma convoys $800 for that so this is a substantial this is an opulent amount of money so this is why Al Qaeda has been seen as a generous provider in some part of of Gao there is actually population the population is nostalgic some people are being nostalgic of you know the Akim era because they said that actually they have less electricity today than they used to have during Al Qaeda period so all this again the solution cannot only be military it has to be on the development level but again once feed for all strategy cannot work we need to target the local communities and their need but yet there is some commonities for example you know it is a pattern in this state that there is an advantage given to the central and to the towns and the rural areas are left neglected we need to give them more and better educational capacities better economic capacities so we need to fight corruption and so on and so forth so the military solution in that regard is not enough as for the question about Algeria I totally agree with you I think you know the trans-regional threat showed the Algerian authorities that their foreign policy is totally outdated and cannot they cannot continue with that I do believe personally and when I went in Algeria in December 2016 I had people I talked with people from the military who were how can I say that intellectually honest to tell me that yet they made a mistake in Mali and they should have you know acted of course they will never say that you know out loud but today for Algeria to reinforce its border and to beef up its border in that region is no longer is no longer enough and the country that has a quite impressive military power should use this power I think also abroad alright thank you very much so we will now get questions from the audience please be very very brief we only have ten minutes okay so I'll start with Bill I love the emphasis on the hyper local and the developmental which I completely agree with so that's not what I'm going to ask about I just agree all three of you at that point I want to ask about the Euro-Magreb-Sahel relationship and security nexus I got an email last night from Olivia who was complaining that the west controls Libya and we had an interesting exchange because I couldn't think of any western or any western's questions controlling anything in Libya and when you think about the Algerian my main problem with Algeria in this context is not hegemonic the Algeria is sort of an anti hegemonic my main problem with Algeria is that they've been anti-wester intervention whether it's the US or France they're not into direct to the west and so my question is given that all the Euro-Magreb of Barcelona 5 plus 5 Mediterranean Union ENP and some other don't work and are Mugreb focused and given that we have to rethink a Mugreb-Sahel European nexus here how can Europe change how can Europe remake its institutional Mugreb-Sahel signal differently get less focused on migration I think the way you guys are thinking because Europe changing its message an approach is going to be a big part of empowering the local all the local things you want to talk about. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Zartman in the middle. Two quick questions to Dahlia you talked about the Algerian army being younger therefore the generation of the battles of Fiji and Amgala has passed on and to some extent does this have any effect on the army's attitude toward the western Sahara and to declare what is your evaluation of the effect of the Moroccan training for West African Imams in the correct version of Islam I'll get more questions all the way to the back gender balance sorry this is a general question it's big idea I was wondering how each of the panelists especially Dahlia what you think about Russia's growing involvement in Mugreb and what its intentions are and how that might impact them. I'll get two more all right so much to all of you very very insightful and I've learned a lot. I like the view that you all took that we particularly when we take the long view the long historical view we should always see the Sahara as a bridge between North Africa and Western Africa and not as a wall I think the long view gives us that insight into that so thanks so much for emphasizing that but my question therefore is is there any role therefore for subcontinental sub-regional organizations like ECOWAS and the Mugreb in this mix what are they doing is there anything they're doing if not is there any role for them in this or alternatively do we put more emphasis on the G5 you mentioned or Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon fighting in that collaborative nature is that the way forward or do we also have to look at the sub-regional organizations but thanks so much for you. Last question. Good morning my name is Sidi Muhammad from Mauritania and when we talk about militancy in the Sahara region in Africa we need to touch up about the Mauritania role. Mauritania as you know since 2007 protects its border and we should use that as a model. That's number one. Number two as we squeeze on the terrorism in Iraq and Syria what are the steps we should take to prevent the spillover of ISIS in Syria, Sahel and Mali on this region. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have about five minutes if we can divide it among the three of you. Let me just give my first thought from the real side. I know the question of the Mauritania as a model I think that's a fascinating idea and we were just discussing that last week in Copenhagen at a conference we were having there. I think one of the things in Copenhagen actually containing a small power there sort of capable of containing the jihadi threat which was potentially very dangerous a couple of years ago and now apparently under control is learning to some extent and they have done the de-radicalization as it's called the theological training and sort of push back to jihadi doctrine combined with the hard efforts of security nation. So I think there is definitely something to a Mauritanian trajectory that some of these tools that we're all talking about may work under certain conditions. The question about conditions for me is what really is a question when we're talking about Mauritania. I mean I would tend to think that Mauritania succeeded because other countries did not to the extent that and that raised the question of applicability of the Mauritania role elsewhere. What do I mean by that? I mean when jihadists are flourishing in all the other countries and Mauritania puts this sort of a pretty coherent program in a small country not really the big price in the Sahel then there seems to have been I mean at least one potential reading of what's really going on with the Mauritania model is that it worked because quite a couple of the other ones let me just say chat or for that reason Egypt in another corner and the Algeria to some extent have moved much harder on their jihadists and the other was a different kind of nexus going on so the battle was brought over there Marley collapsed the battle so Mauritania somehow could pass beyond the radar to a certain extent. I think there's a part of the truth in that. That said I think there's some interesting lessons in the Mauritania success story so to say. Now I jumped totally back and then I only spent a couple of minutes but here I think the question of Europe and Bill brought that up, Europe changing its priorities. I think it's a big deal and I heard Claire speaking about this that Europe is not really Europe it's a large majority a sort of conglomerate of individual states even Denmark, my country of origin or at least my nationality. We want our own Middle East policy and it's kind of ridiculous because we have 5 million people but still we have our programs, we have our sort of high priorities of doing diplomatic and we believe that we were behind the Oslo process and so on and so forth. The Middle East is a price to do politics on to some extent and that includes also North Africa less than the core Middle East and I think that in the macro region of France is a major player and much comes down to can you swing France because if you swing France in European circles then you swing a large part of the European nations. Claire knows much more about this and she's probably going to pick up but I think that's one of the core issues we're looking at. I think you're completely right that one of the big deals here is to make Europe sort of adapt to this reality here I mean it's linked to you as retrenchment withdrawal and Europe will have to respond much more forcefully and that may be sort of the opportunity in the crisis for you that's what everybody's hoping right now. It may also be the crisis in the crisis that just sort of exhilarates the inability to act on both long-term development policy and the migration and anti-terrorism and that makes us so far we've seen the two other ones, the two last ones win over the long-term development and we all know here and I think that came across from Dalia and all colleagues here that the development issue is fundamental to long-term handling of these issues. It seems it's around but it is losing ground even the core development agencies that I'm advising they're saying listen can we frame this as security and say oh yeah we can but I mean because as we know it goes together so I'll keep it with that. That's the big question at the moment, can't Europe change? I mean internally as much as externally as you know I'm you know where I'm sitting we're drowning in Brexit and one of the problems that I foresee is that the focus of Europe is not going to be very clearly on long-term strategies until Brexit is over we're facing Europe, we still have the Euro crisis but in the short term we may see some changes because we have elections in which there is going to be a new French president which is not whoever wins is not going to look like the current French president in May. We have German presidential elections where it may be the same chancellor or it will be somebody with a very similar approach so I don't see there's going to be major changes in the German policy but the reason I raise German policies towards this region is they're not traditionally seen as a big partner in this region and yet since 2011 they've been increasing technical assistance, joint projects, not just security, there has been some fairly intelligent development assistance in places like Tunisia. The issue I think Europeans have is convincing European public it's worth investing the money, this is our backyard happening in Chadnesia or whatever that is unsighted for most European populations. Governments have to make the case that it does matter because this is the way the trafficking of people and the big issue of the day is illegal migration and how we manage that in future and that has not been well managed internally by European Union states. In fact it's brought out the worst in most Europeans because they won't take in refugees, leave alone the managing legal migration properly. So I don't think there's much chance in the short term where there's some opportunity. Those going to the ECOWAS question is that the European Union is working much more closely with ECOWAS which has its own conflict prevention network. I think there's been just in the last couple of weeks the 21st ECOWAS EU summit so I think that is an opportunity to say look at the regional cooperation across the Sahel itself, frankly in my view is a bit of a pipe dream, getting Mauritania to Chad really to cooperate in ways that they can jointly coordinate and stop things happening in their region. A sort of north south focus where you get input from ECOWAS on what actually has worked because ECOWAS does have some, it's not all these things as success stories but given that Al Qaeda and the Islamic migration, my grandpa's launch and offshoots have launched attacks into as far afield as Côte d'Ivoire recently, you know it's suddenly becoming more of a headache for West Africa that better coordination and better insights from the West African perspective actually to clarify exactly what kind of assistance will do the trick could be good so long as it is cognizant of governments doing things on behalf of their people doing things on their own behalf which I think is the weakness of the current corporation and finally the Imam training is a very good example but as I said before I don't think the issue is one of people becoming radicalized, I think as Dahlia has explained in more detail it's the way that these more radical individuals who started life as criminals rather than as Imams or religious figures and I would doubt that Bel Mohtar is anyone practicing Muslim would see as a religious figure have appropriated networks through embedding themselves in local tribal networks. What I would say is that for every tribe he or anybody else marries into there's going to be another tribe who don't like them so there's room to get a coalition to fight back. So I will be very brief regarding the question about the new generation and the military and the western Sahara. Let us keep in mind you know that self-determination is a very it's a crucial element in the subjective framework through which the Algerian nationalism can institute itself. The Algerian sees they see sorry the struggle for independence as their own struggle against the French. I said it's true that the military is younger but we need to keep in mind that the old generation has plenty of time to socialize and educate the new generation to their way of thinking and way of action. So I hope that answers your question. As for the Russian, you know Russian has been for a long time supplier, weapons supplier for Algerians. I think the Kremlin is very pragmatic about that. They know that the Algerians have this, they had this desire to professionalize and to buy weapons so they just jump into the market. And in 2014 the Algerians and the Russian signed a contract of more than one billion dollar. I think the Russian are being pragmatic but also the Algerian, they want the professionalization of their military and they are going to find it in the Russian but also in the Chinese. The Chinese has been important suppliers. I think you know for Russians they want or they are seeking at least to use their diplomatic but also economic and security influence wherever they can in the Maghreb and they are doing it in Algeria, in Morocco and so on and so forth. And they will continue probably to do it in the next upcoming years. Alright, thank you very much. So with that please join me in thanking our panelists. Thank you.