Following 11 years of defence cooperation and millions of dollars spent on maintaining military bases, the United States officially pulled its troops out of Niger this week in a surprise divorce that experts are calling a “blow” to Washington’s ambitions for influence in the troubled Sahel region of West Africa.
Once-close relations between the two countries saw the US establish large, expensive military bases from which it launched surveillance drones in Niger to monitor myriad armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS).
