Drones Aren’t the Sahel’s Silver Bullet

In November 2020, rebels belonging to the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) began mounting attacks on the Ethiopian federal military over concerns that the Tigrayan people were being sidelined by the administration and that political reforms were undermining long-standing decentralized methods of governance. Later in the war, as the TDF rampaged through the country, seizing strategic cities, many in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, feared they were next. Embassies and businesses rapidly evacuated their staff as the government struggled to slow the Tigrayan advance.

Yet almost overnight, a miraculous turnaround took place. The Ethiopian government, which had relied primarily on ground offensives, deployed Iranian, Chinese, and Turkish drones to target TDF troops and supply lines. The result was remarkable. The government recaptured the cities of Dessie, Kombolcha, Chifra, Shewa Robit, Gashena, and Lalibela over a matter of weeks in late 2021, pushing the TDF to retreat. A year later, a peace agreement—largely on Ethiopia’s terms—was signed with the rebels.

The remarkable success of drones in this context seems to support the long-held assumption that drones are force multipliers in warfare, allowing users to gather much broader aerial surveillance than otherwise possible while also launching airstrikes with no risk of loss of life to pilots. Many leaders, particularly in West Africa, have taken note and acquired drones in the hope that the technology might help them in their own military quagmires. Despite success in Ethiopia, drones won’t necessarily be a silver bullet in the Sahel. By deploying this technology, governments may instead bolster the very rebel groups they’re trying to defeat.

From 2012 to 2022, the French military played a critical role in keeping the rebels at bay, but its inability to totally defeat the jihadis frustrated West African governments, leading to diplomatic disputes and mounting anti-French sentiment across much of the region. As this relationship soured and French troops ultimately withdrew from Mali and Burkina Faso, they have increasingly come to rely on support from the Russian Wagner Group instead. This hasn’t proved to be a particularly effective tactic either—Malian and Wagner operatives have frequently been accused of human rights abuses, including a massacre in Moura in March 2022 in which more than 300 people were killed.

The repeated military takeovers in Burkina Faso and Mali, largely as a result of frustration over the failure to address the jihadi threat, have only worsened insecurity. In June 2022, a mediator for the Economic Community of West African States said just 60 percent of Burkina Faso remained under state control, while a U.N. report released that month found that Mali controlled as little as 15 percent of its territory.

It is unsurprising then, having witnessed Ethiopia’s rapid reversal of fortunes in its conflict against Tigrayan rebels, that West African leaders are seeking drones for themselves.

Last year, Burkina Faso became the third West African country to buy Turkish-made drones—specifically the Bayraktar TB2—to aid its fight against jihadis, amid other purchases by Togo, Mali, and Niger. This particular model has gained notoriety in recent months for its efficacy in Ukraine. One Ukrainian general even claimed that these drones had allowed the country’s forces to destroy Russian tanks and weaponry—valued around $27 million—over three days in 2022. The drones were so popular that the Ukrainian military wrote a song dedicated specifically to the TB2.

Equipped with a laser targeting mechanism and four laser-guided micro missiles, TB2 drones can stay in the air for 27 hours and reach an altitude of about 25,000 feet. In areas as vast and sparsely populated as the Sahel, where surveillance is almost impossible, drones’ high-tech reconnaissance capabilities could provide a distinct advantage for regional governments in gathering intelligence about their enemies. Further, the TB2 is at the right price point for West African buyers, as it costs a fraction of what similar American and Israeli drones go for. It’s no wonder many see this model as the silver bullet the Sahel has been dreaming of in its seemingly endless fight against jihadi groups.

But the TB2 isn’t necessarily the panacea that it seems.

Drones are often lauded for their precision. In theory, they allow troops to launch more targeted strikes without putting ground troops in danger or bombing larger areas and risking civilian casualties. Yet they have also come under serious scrutiny for their role in perpetrating human rights abuses and killing civilians. In August 2021, for example, a U.S. drone strike killed 10 civilians in Kabul; and in January 2022, the Ethiopian military used a drone to drop bombs on an IDP camp, killing at least 57 people.

In counterinsurgency operations, where the line between civilian and combatant is often blurred, drones have rarely been an effective tool for defeating rebel groups and ending conflict. This is partly due to the difficulty of correctly interpreting the information provided by drones. Although drones are precision-guided, they require a human operator to assess the data provided by cameras and sensors to decide whether to launch an attack or not. But humans are not yet highly effective at interpreting that data, which often leads to misguided launches and the mistaken killings of civilians or the wrong targets.

Despite the dangers drone use poses, current international regulation of the technology is minimal. Governments and militaries often justify the lethal use of force on a legally murky basis, and they are rarely transparent about how they intend to use drone technology once they’ve acquired it. Without international accountability mechanisms for responsible drone usage, “it’s the Wild, Wild West,” according to Wim Zwijnenburg, the project leader for humanitarian disarmament at PAX, a Netherlands-based peace activism organization.

This lack of accountability not only enables reckless behavior to go unchecked; it also undermines states’ goals of pushing back against jihadi violence. The involvement of drones in mass casualty attacks against citizens in the Sahel builds resentment among local populations and will likely play into the hands of jihadi fighters, who will use the tragedies to recruit new members.

Adding to the pile of unintended consequences, the increasing use of drones by governments in the Sahel also raises the likelihood that drones will end up in the hands of jihadis themselves. Armed groups in East Africa, such as al-Shabab, have already begun using drones more widely, and given the low price tag of Turkish drones supplied in West Africa, there are concerns that jihadis in the Sahel could follow suit.

Although Turkey is currently unlikely to sell these to jihadi groups given the reputational damage it would do, especially among its NATO allies, drone sales to armed groups are not unheard of—Iran is accused of selling weaponized drones to rebels in Yemen. “We are likely to see weaponized commercial drones increasingly used by nonstate armed groups in these areas over the next year,” Zwijnenburg said. In this respect, Turkish drones bear resemblance to the AK-47 automatic rifle, a cheap weapon that was made for state militaries in the 1940s but has since become widely used by rebel groups all over the world.

More broadly, even if these complications could be resolved, it is unclear whether drones provide meaningful strategic value to states in the Sahel. In counterinsurgency operations, drones can eliminate high-value targets, but it is rarely clear how this connects to an overarching strategy for winning the conflict writ large. The long-standing presence of U.S. and French drones in the Sahel, for instance, has done little to significantly push back jihadi forces. Although both have claimed some major kills with drones—France killed Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, the head of Islamic State in the Greater Sahara in northern Mali, in an August 2021 drone strike—they have not fundamentally damaged jihadi operations.

Drones are a flashy, affordable, and tempting way for leaders to demonstrate military power to the general public, but there are hardly any cases of drones being a part of an effective counterinsurgency strategy. “You can’t defeat an ideology just by killing everyone,” Zwijnenburg said.

Despite major successes elsewhere in places such as Ethiopia and Ukraine, drones cannot be considered a game-changer in the Sahel, said Federico Donelli, an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Trieste. “They can be useful in specific operations, especially surveillance, but not to respond efficiently to the spread” of jihadi violence.

In this particularly fraught context, drones present yet another military solution to a problem that is unlikely to be resolved solely with upgraded weaponry. While their advanced technologies may help win some battles, they seem more likely to sabotage Sahel states’ efforts in the long run. To effect real change, leaders should opt for a less flashy approach: expanding access to infrastructure, jobs, and education and improving governance and rule of law in their countries. West African states that hope drones will be a shortcut to a better future may find themselves with buyer’s remorse.