 Mohammed, in the last report, a briefing you did to the Security Council, you wrote and spoke of, and I quote, a worsening security situation in the entire Sahel. And you elaborated and spoke about benditism, terrorism, inter-communal violence. You also mentioned some progress on the governance side, democracy building, but basically you concentrated on the worsening security situation pointing to Mali and Burkina Faso particularly. So my question to you is, could you give us a little bit more detail on the specific kind and the magnitude of the security challenges in that region, and also try to tell us what organizations like the G5 Sahel or Burkina or the UN mission in Mali actually can do? Please, Mohammed. Well, there are two areas to keep in mind here. First of all, the Sahel and then the Lechad Basin area, which are facing specific threats from terrorist and violent extremism. In the Sahel, the result of the situation and the activities of the terrorist group in north of Mali, which has descended to central Mali and now is pulling over into Burkina Faso and Niger. We are indeed witnessing what we have characterized as this deterioration in the security situation in the Sahel region. And evidence of it is the almost now daily attacks by terrorist groups in Mali, of course, particularly in central Mali, which has also triggered inter-communal conflicts because of the skilful manner in which the terrorist groups have infiltrated setting communities, leading to an unfortunate characterization of the entire community as supporting terrorism, and therefore the kind of attacks that we see, very unfortunate attacks that we see, for instance, in Mali, between the Pearl communities and the Dagon. And then, of course, this has flowed over into initially into Niger, in west of Niger, in the provinces of Tilabere and Tyre, which also are more and more witnessing the presence, the very active presence of these terrorist groups. Recently, and this has caused the entire region to wake up to this challenge, we have also seen in the Sahel the phenomena of terrorism descending into Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso, which otherwise had been seen as a fairly stable, strong country, sort of a buffer between the Sahel and the coastal states, is indeed descending into this instability, regular attacks while we were here. Two days ago, there was an attack near Fadah Gruma, which has come pretty south because this is one of the bigger cities, towns in Burkina Faso, a little bit outside of the Zoom and Sahel region. And it's a crossroad city linking many of the countries such as Benet, Togo, Ghana, and in fact a major regional highway into Niger. So when cities like that come under threat, then you see that this phenomena is expanding. So in general, that is the threat in the Sahel. And this particularly linked to terrorist groups which have been known to exist in north of Mali and have declared and do have links with international terrorist groups, al-Qaeda, Islamic states, et cetera. Now in the lecture basing, it's a slightly different story. You could talk of a homegrown terrorist group, which Boko Haram is, haven't come out of Borno State in northeast of Nigeria, and initially affecting six northeastern states of Nigeria and then spreading into Cameroon, into Chad, and into Niger, for instance, south of Niger in Defa County. And although it was seen as maybe perhaps just a fluke, it has shown resilience. In the campaign that brought current President Buharing to power, his strength and I think the perception that he succeeded in giving was that being a former military man, and a rather tough reputation from those days of military governments in West Africa, that he would take on and defeat Boko Haram. Boko Haram recently celebrated his 10th anniversary, and that more or less in the 50th year of the government of President Buharing. So it hasn't been that easy to fully contain Boko Haram. It remains effective in Borno State. I should say the progress has definitely been made, because before it was at least six states in northeast that were threatened. Today, Boko Haram's influence and effectiveness reduced to Borno State. So that's definitely progress. And certainly even in Cameroon, in Chad, we have seen that there is their influence or their effectiveness that have been reduced, and it's reduced to just predatory attacks on communities, on villages, etc. The response of the region has been, in both cases, on the one hand, the creation of the Jason Sahel as a community of countries facing this existential threat from terrorist violent extremists in the Sahel. And they have been able to organize to seek to address the phenomena in a comprehensive way, more or less along the lines of whether you and advocates that it should be a total approach, not just a security approach, but also address root causes. That means address the poverty and sometimes exclusion. And what Professor Roberto so has talked about, the governance deficit that in some of these countries, because the territories are so huge, whether you take Mali or Niger or Chad, and the government itself, the question of state capacity, so limited, its presence has not been felt in some communities. And then let's face it, there has been clearly some discrimination and negligence and just not the right attitude of some communities in the past. So all of these need to be attacked at the same time as we seek to address the poverty and the lack of basic socioeconomic infrastructure of schools, of education, providing for women and youth, particularly generating youth and employment. So the Jason Sahel has this comprehensive approach in addition to seeking to stand up a force to fight against terrorism and which force, of course, UN position has been very clear, especially Secretary General and all his advisors have recommended that this needs the support of Security Council. And so we still hope that Security Council will come around to authorize support, direct support to this force. And very quickly, if we shift back to lectured basin countries, they have also made their own effort in standing up what is called the multinational joint task force, where the four countries have contributed troops. I must say they have been a bit more even advanced than the Jason Sahel, which is in a way still working project in progress. The MNJTF has actually been operational with support, you know, from Force Balkan, which is deployed in the region, but also from EU in particular, but partners such as U.S., France, and the U.K., which have provided bilateral support. And then Nigeria's role there has to be acknowledged, where the initial 100 million dollars was granted from Nigeria. So there is that effort to deal with the problem in the security sense. But for me, the most significant is the acknowledgement that the root causes of this phenomenon of violent extremism and terrorism needs to be addressed. Hence, in the lectured basin, you now have a regional stabilization strategy, which addresses not just the security aspect, but indeed is also looking at how do we ensure that this objective of sustainable development, SDGs, is actually part of the national programs decentralized to these regions where we are seeing high levels of poverty, low electricity rates, lack of health, and other basic facilities that need to be there. And now to give it a regional chapel, we have recently seen the EQUAS convene a summit on the 14th of September, where West Africa as a whole together with Sahel. And it's significant that for this summit, Cameroon, Chad, and Mauritania were invited. As if to say, this is no longer a problem just exclusive to the Sahel countries, like Chad basin countries. It's a problem that is threatening even coastal states and countries like Senegal, and Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benet are saying we would like to join hands in tackling this phenomenon and in ensuring a truly regional approach in the fight against terrorism and violent extremism. What I understand you're saying is that the root courses, of course, are not terrorism and jihadism, but governance, poverty, lack of sustainability in development. But when I understood your interventions yesterday and the day before here at this conference correctly, you were basically saying the Europeans and the Americans should engage as strongly, and I understood militarily, as they do in Syria and Iraq. Is that your recommendation, actually? Well, some who will be probably less diplomatic will say that until the Libya problem is solved, what we are doing in West Africa and Sahel is maybe just putting a bandage on the wound because they will argue strongly that, and in fact, some of the heads of state in the region often say, we told you to be careful about Libya, and you didn't listen. So perhaps as Colin Powell would say, if you broke it, you fix it. And until Libya, frankly, is stabilized, that it's a capable state there and doesn't become a theater where all these groups have free rein and with a different support. So that's the concern of Sahel and West African states. Yes, it's true that if you look at governance issues and if you look at neglect of past governments, particularly military governments in Nigeria, it's not a secret that most of the military governments were left by people from the north and who, frankly, did not do enough. Shouldn't be the case that you go to Borno and literacy rate is less than 50 percent. That's not acceptable today, that there are not enough schools. And you can repeat that of whether it's extreme note in Cameroon or in Chad and in the areas of Burkina Faso where you're seeing this phenomenon. There are certain patterns that there was clearly, I mean, 60 years after independence, it shouldn't be that that level of poverty still persists, but it's the reality. And then not to forget even the aspect of women, that they are not being enrolled in school. The fertility rates are still too high, whether it's in Niger or Mali. So all these issues need to be dealt with, but we have to also understand that today the groups that are fighting there are aligned to international terrorist groups of Al-Qaeda, of Islamic State, Islamic State West Africa province, claiming attacks in Niger, attacks that led to killing of Americans in northeast of Nigeria, of Borno State. Now I'm saying that one of the factions of Boko Haram is fully aligned with Islamic State West Africa province. So there are those internal factors with your governance issues that need to be dealt with, but our concern is also that these groups are aligned with international terrorist group. And that's why we say that the same vigor with which these nefarious groups were taken on and defeated in Iraq, in Syria, we are not seeing that same favor, that same vigor, but we need that on the part of international community. Thank you.