- On July 24, five African Parks rangers were killed in Benin’s W National Park along with seven soldiers from the Benin Armed Forces.
- The attack is the second incident in which major casualties were suffered by African Parks 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 monitoring outpost they shared with Beninese troops was attacked and overrun by fighters from JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
- While African Parks has previously stated it would pull its personnel back from high-risk areas, the attack indicates that its rangers still participate in operations led by the Benin Armed Forces.
Northern Benin is fast becoming one of the most dangerous areas in the world for wildlife rangers: In late July, five rangers working for the conservation NGO African Parks were killed in an attack by militants along with seven Beninese soldiers in W National Park, which borders Burkina Faso and Niger.
The incident comes just over two years after a roadside bomb ambush claimed the lives of five African Parks rangers and a French anti-poaching trainer. That attack also took place inside W, which is now a crucial front in West Africa’s struggle to contain jihadist insurgencies that began expanding across the Sahel region in 2011.
W is part of the W-Arly-Pendjari Complex, a 34,000-square-kilometer (13,100-square-mile) landscape that contains some of the region’s last remaining elephants, cheetahs and lions. A sprawling mix of wooded savanna, swampy estuaries and gallery forests, W-Arly-Pendjari is one of the few remaining habitats capable of carrying sizeable populations of major fauna in West Africa.
The complex lies across the borders of Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. Beginning in the late 2010s, militant groups began to entrench themselves in the latter two, drawn by a governance vacuum, the landscape’s dense forests and its lucrative trade and smuggling routes.
“The jihadists are able to navigate through the park quite easily, particularly on the Burkina and Niger side,” said Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, deputy director of the International Crisis Group’s Sahel Project, and the author of a 2023 report about activity of armed groups inside W. “The Benin authorities are trying to control their portion of the park, which exposes them to attacks.”
Since 2021, the number of attacks by militant groups inside Benin has been on the rise, with the Africa Center for Strategic Studies predicting that 2024 will be the worst year so far. The worsening security situation in the north has raised fears that jihadi violence could be on the verge of spilling out from the Sahel into coastal West Africa.
“These groups expand because they are looking for new opportunities, new hideouts, new logistical routes,” Ibrahim said.
It has also put African Parks in a difficult and dangerous position, with multiple sources telling Mongabay the conservation group has been integrated into the Benin Armed Forces’ Operation Mirador, a U.S. and EU-supported mission to prevent jihadi groups from making further inroads into the country.
“They have to work together,” Ibrahim said. “They find ways to collaborate, often with the army being in charge, particularly when it comes to counterterrorism operations in the park, which have the backing of rangers. That’s the reason why when you see there’s an attack, both sides are affected.”
African Parks, which signed an agreement with Benin’s government to manage W in 2020, has released scant 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 Dutch Clingendael Institute, African Parks denied playing a border security role, calling the allegation 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 into the core conservation zones of W and Pendjari, a nearby park it has managed since 2017 that has also been targeted 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 inside of W due to their knowledge of the landscape and how to deal with wildlife encounters. The casualties sustained 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 that was inside the park in northeast W, which was used to track movements,” the researcher said. “The army has created a bunch of them in the parks where they have these little locations where they try to see what’s happening, and this position simply got overwhelmed by jihadists. It was just taken over. So, it wasn’t IEDs, it was a gunfight, and one that was pretty unbalanced.”
JNIM, which is considered one of the fiercest jihadi groups and is present in multiple Sahel countries, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
As part of its increasingly urgent response to the jihadi threat, Benin has deployed nearly 3,000 soldiers to its northern border since 2022. Both W and Pendjari have become highly militarized and extensively mined, but so far the soldiers and their Western allies have failed to stop militants from moving in and out of the two parks.
“This is a war zone,” the researcher said. “We have to expect casualties in those areas.”
Since it began operating in the Beninese side of W, one of 22 protected areas the group manages in 12 countries, African Parks has been in a difficult position — and one that few, if any, other conservation organizations working on the continent share. While most groups work with host country agencies that arm and command ranger detachments, African Parks has its own 1,400-strong cadre of wildlife rangers. Those rangers are often deployed in protected areas that are near to active war zones — but their training is designed for enforcing conservation rules against hunting and small-scale mining.
African Parks manages parks in the DRC, Central African Republic and South Sudan — and has encountered rebel groups in the past. But in Benin, their rangers have found themselves confronting some of the continent’s deadliest jihadi militias, fighting in a war they didn’t expect and aren’t trained for.
In a statement posted on its website earlier this year, African Parks acknowledged it was in a “challenging situation” and had faced pressure to withdraw from northern Benin. But it said that doing so “would have devastating consequences for people, for biodiversity, for the host country and the region at large.”
The group said it had “pulled back from the areas under threat.”
But multiple sources told Mongabay that African Parks rangers often operate alongside Beninese soldiers as scouts and guides.
“[The army] cannot operate in those areas without the backing of the 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 monitoring operations, citing security concerns and directing questions to the Benin Armed Forces.
Because of the risks of travel and research around W — in 2022, a Dutch journalist was detained and deported for attempting to report in the area — information about the Beninese military’s operations there is limited. But in a study released in July, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies said that “heavy-handed” tactics by troops around the border had “inadvertently deepened grievances” toward Cotonou in some communities.
After a rocky start in neighboring Pendjari, sources told Mongabay that African Parks has made inroads with communities living near W. In recent years, the group has opened up some parts of the park’s buffer zone to livestock grazing, improving its image with pastoralists who are being squeezed by land disputes with local farmers.
“When I was doing my research in [W], honestly most people told me a lot of great things about how African Parks was running the place for people who were naturally closest to the jihadist groups, the pastoralist communities,” Ibrahim said.
While some research suggests JNIM and other militants have begun to have more success recruiting inside Benin, most attacks in and around W continue to be cross-border, originating from Burkina Faso or Niger. How much support the groups have among communities living near the park in Benin isn’t entirely clear.
“You hear a lot this storyline that JNIM is supposedly trying to gain traction with the local population by promising to give back the park, but that’s not what we see in practice at all,” said the researcher who requested anonymity. “In practice, civilians are getting killed by the groups inside the park a lot.”
In a statement it posted about the July attack, African Parks said it would provide support for 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, you had a lot of rangers who just quit on the spot,” the researcher said. “Obviously that just makes sense. They’d been trained to fight against poachers, not jihadists.”
In Benin, the line between conservation and counterinsurgency blurs
Banner image: Still image from a propaganda video released by JNIM in early 2024 depicting a training camp in Burkina Faso.
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