ABIDJAN - The United States has reset relations with west Africa’s military leaders under President Donald Trump on a mutual back-scratching basis, bartering help fighting jihadists for the Sahel region’s mining riches, experts said.

Washington makes military aid overtures to Sahel juntas

While former President Joe Biden was in office, the US suspended most of the development and military aid it sent to Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the wake of the rash of coups that brought juntas to power in the three restive countries between 2020 and 2023.

Trump’s return to the White House has shifted the US away from that stance, as part of a wider pivot in Washington’s African foreign policy and its attempts to counter Russia and China’s influence on the continent.

“Trade, not aid... is now truly our policy for Africa,” Troy Fitrell, the State Department’s top official for African affairs, told an audience in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in May.

In recent weeks, several other senior American figures have paid visits to the capitals of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which have all been struggling to root out jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group for more than a decade.

In early July, Rudolph Atallah, a security and counter-terrorism adviser to Trump, visited Mali to offer the “American solution” for the unrest.

“We have the necessary equipment, the intelligence and the forces to stand up to this menace. If Mali decides to work with us, we’ll know what to do,” Atallah was quoted as saying by the country’s state newspaper.

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Mali is among Africa’s top producers of gold and lithium, a key component in the electric car batteries necessary for the transition to a low-carbon economy in the age of climate change.

Burkina Faso likewise possesses rich veins of gold, while Niger’s uranium deposits make the desert nation among the world’s top exporters of the radioactive metal.

Although all three Sahel juntas came to power while promising the people greater control and sovereignty over their country’s mineral wealth, the officers in charge have welcomed Washington’s change in tack.