- On July 24, five African Parks rangers and seven soldiers of the Beninese armed forces were killed in W National Park in Benin.
- The attack is the second incident in which African Parks has suffered serious casualties in W National Park. In 2022, five rangers were killed in an IED ambush.
- According to a source interviewed by Mongabay, the rangers were killed when a surveillance post they shared with Beninese troops was attacked and overrun by fighters from JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
- African Parks had previously said it would withdraw its staff from high-risk areas, but the attack suggests the organization’s rangers are still participating in operations by the Beninese armed forces.
Northern Benin is quickly becoming one of the most dangerous areas in the world for gamekeepers: at the end of July, five rangers from the conservation NGO African Parks and seven Beninese soldiers were killed in an attack by militants in the W National Park, which borders Burkina Faso and Niger.
The incident comes nearly two years after a roadside bomb attack claimed the lives of five African Parks rangers and a French anti-poaching trainer. That attack also occurred inside West Africa, which is now a crucial front in West Africa’s fight against jihadist insurgencies that began spreading across the Sahel in 2011.
W is part of the W-Arly-Pendjari complex, a 34,000 square kilometre landscape that is home to some of the region’s last remaining elephants, cheetahs and lions. W-Arly-Pendjari is an extensive mix of wooded savannah, swampy estuaries and gallery forests, and is one of the few remaining habitats capable of supporting significant populations of important species in West Africa.
The complex stretches across the borders of Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. From the late 2010s, militant groups began to entrench themselves in the latter two countries, attracted by a government vacuum, the countryside’s dense forests and their lucrative trade and smuggling routes.
“The jihadists can move through the park quite easily, especially on the Burkinabe and Nigerien sides,” says Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, deputy director of the International Crisis Group’s Sahel project and author of a 2023 report on the activities of armed groups in the west. “The authorities in Benin are trying to control their part of the park, which leaves them vulnerable to attacks.”
Since 2021, the number of attacks by militant groups in Benin has been increasing. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies predicts that 2024 will be the worst year yet. The deteriorating security situation in the north has raised fears that jihadist violence is about to spread from the Sahel to the West African coast.
“These groups are expanding because they are looking for new opportunities, new hiding places and new logistical routes,” Ibrahim said.
Moreover, it has put African Parks in a difficult and dangerous position: several sources have told Mongabay that the conservation group has been integrated into the Beninese armed forces’ Operation Mirador, a US- and EU-backed mission aimed at preventing jihadist groups from advancing further into the country.
“They have to work together,” Ibrahim said. “They find ways to work together, often under the leadership of the army, especially in anti-terror operations in the park, which are supported by rangers. That’s why when there is an attack, both sides are affected.”
African Parks, which signed an agreement with the Benin government to manage W in 2020, has provided few details about the July attack, saying only that it took place near the Mékrou River, which forms part of the border between Benin and its two northern neighbors.
In a 2021 letter to the Netherlands’ Clingendael Institute, African Parks denied playing a role in border security and called claims that it was participating in counterterrorism operations “categorically false.” The following year, after militants attacked a ranger patrol with improvised bombs, African Parks said it would withdraw its rangers to the core protection zones of W and Pendjari, a nearby park it has managed since 2017 that has also been attacked by militants.
But according to a researcher with experience in northern Benin who spoke to Mongabay on condition of anonymity, African Parks rangers often accompany soldiers on patrol in the west because they know the landscape and how to handle encounters with wildlife. The casualties suffered by African Parks and the Beninese army in late July were the result of a surprise attack on a shared campsite.
“It was a military position in the park in the northeast west that was used to monitor movements,” the researcher said. “The army has set up a lot of these in the parks where they have these little sites from which they try to see what’s happening, and that position was simply overwhelmed by jihadists. It was simply taken over. So it wasn’t IEDs, it was a gunfight, and one that was quite unbalanced.”
The JNIM, which is considered one of the strongest jihadist groups and is present in several Sahel countries, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
As part of its increasingly urgent response to the jihadist threat, Benin has deployed nearly 3,000 troops along its northern border since 2022. Both W and Pendjari are heavily militarized and extensively mined, but so far the soldiers and their Western allies have failed to prevent militants from moving in and out of the two parks.
“This is a war zone,” said the researcher. “We have to expect casualties in these areas.”
Since African Parks began operations on the Beninese side of W, one of 22 protected areas the group manages in 12 countries, it has found itself in a difficult position – one shared by few, if any, other conservation organizations on the continent. While most groups work with host country authorities who arm and command ranger detachments, African Parks has its own 1,400-strong cadre of game wardens. These rangers are often deployed in protected areas that are close to active war zones – but their training is geared towards enforcing conservation regulations against hunting and small-scale mining.
African Parks manages national parks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan – and has encountered rebel groups in the past. But in Benin, the rangers now found themselves confronted with some of the continent’s deadliest jihadist militias, fighting a war they had not expected and for which they were not trained.
In a statement posted on the park’s website earlier this year, African Parks acknowledged it was in a “difficult situation” and under pressure to withdraw from northern Benin, but said doing so would have “devastating consequences for people, biodiversity, the host country and the entire region”.
The group said it had “withdrawn from the threatened areas.”
But several sources told Mongabay that African Parks rangers often act alongside Beninese soldiers as scouts and guides.
“(The army) cannot operate in these areas without the support of rangers who know how to navigate the park,” Ibrahim said.
African Parks declined to respond to Mongabay’s request for information about its role in Benin’s counterterrorism and border surveillance operations, citing security concerns and referring questions to the Beninese armed forces.
Because of the risks involved in traveling and researching in Region W – in 2022, a Dutch journalist was arrested and expelled while attempting to report in the area – information on the Beninese military’s operations there is limited. However, in a study published in July, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies found that “harsh” tactics by troops on the border had “inadvertently exacerbated grievances in some communities” with Cotonou.
Sources told Mongabay that after a rocky start in neighboring Pendjari, African Parks has made progress with communities near W. In recent years, the group has opened up some parts of the park’s buffer zone to cattle ranching, improving its image among ranchers who have come under pressure from land disputes with local farmers.
“When I was doing my research in (W), most people honestly told me a lot of great things about how African Parks runs the place for the people who are inherently closest to the jihadist groups, the pastoral communities,” Ibrahim said.
While some research suggests that JNIM and other militants have become more successful at recruiting in Benin, most attacks in and around W continue to cross borders, originating from Burkina Faso or Niger. It is not entirely clear how much support the groups have in communities near the park in Benin.
“You often hear the story that JNIM is supposedly trying to appeal to the local population by promising to return the park, but in practice that is not the case at all,” said the researcher, who wished to remain anonymous. “In fact, civilians are frequently killed by the groups in the park.”
In a statement following the attack in July, African Parks said it would provide support to the families of the fallen rangers. But with at least 10 casualties in just over two years, being an African Parks ranger in Benin is fast becoming the most dangerous job in conservation.
“When the first attacks occurred, many rangers immediately gave up,” said the researcher. “That makes sense, of course. They were trained to fight poachers, not jihadists.”
In Benin, the line between nature conservation and counterinsurgency is blurring
Banner image: Still from a propaganda video released by JNIM in early 2024 showing a training camp in Burkina Faso.
