Kidnappings soar in central Africa’s ‘triangle of death’

Tired of waiting for the authorities to come to their aid, young men in the Mayo-Kebbi Ouest region of south-west Chad are banding into vigilante groups, using bows, arrows and spears to fight gunmen who have turned kidnapping into a professional pastime.

“We guide the gendarmes in the bush, but we are also the first to go after the criminals after a kidnapping,” said Amos Nangyo, head of one of the units in Pala, capital of the region, which borders Cameroon, told Agence France-Presse earlier this month.

In the last decade, the Sahelian tri-border area of Liptako-Gourma – where Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger meet – has become a hotspot for booming jihadist activity.

But another crisis is brewing in a nearby area that some have called “the triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in the Central African Republic.

Official data is hard to come by for this area and many people do not report incidents for fear of further attacks.

But Chadian authorities say ransoms paid in the area amounted to 43 million Central African Francs (CFA) in 2022 and increased to 52.4 million CFA the following year.

In February, a Polish doctor and her Mexican colleague were abducted from the Tandjilé region but was freed a week later, after a combined rescue mission by Chadian and French forces.

Approximately 86 million CFA was paid in ransom in six incidents between February and May 2023 in Cameroon’s Northern Region, according to a recent report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

---

The rise in abductions is happening alongside small arms trafficking, cattle rustling and drug trafficking. Economic interests, rather than ethnic or religious grudges, are driving kidnappings, according to experts.

In west and central Africa, porous borders are the norm, allowing terror groups such as Boko Haram, for example, to move along the diagonal from northern Nigeria to the Cameroon-Chad-CAR corridor to find possible victims as well as criminal allies to finance their jihadist ventures.

Other regional players include ethnic Fulani herders, who experts say can be both perpetrators and victims, given their nomadic lifestyle and the complex nature of criminal activity in the zone.

The Fulani, perceived as having a lot of money by virtue of having herds of cattle, have long been targets of kidnapping. But some herders, grieving the loss of their cattle and other belongings to rustling, or tired of being harassed by security personnel, have turned to kidnapping too.

There are also the zaraguinas , gangs of rampaging bandits and mercenary rebels who are active in the forests of northern CAR, some having migrated in from its neighbours such as Chad. With the presence of foreign counterparts like the Wagner group in CAR, some local mercenaries have moved to Chad.

Targets include traders, civil servants, aid workers and anyone who seems remotely important or likely to have relatives and friends capable of raising ransoms.

Insecurity escalated south of the Sahara in 2011 after the Nato-led ousting of Muammar Gaddafi opened a highway for the southward flow of small arms and light weapon, galvanising rebel activity from Mali to Nigeria.

This made Chad, a country with a history of long-running domestic conflicts and a reputation for breeding warriors in the hinterlands, even more fertile ground for armed non-state actors who export themselves to stoke conflicts or extinguish them elsewhere.

Remadji Hoinathy, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies for Central Africa and Lake Chad Basin who is based in N’Djamena, said “the geography and even the demography and anthropology of that zone” was key to its emergence as a recruitment centre for armed groups and a nucleus of the kidnapping crisis.

“A lot of people in Chad [have] grown up with rebellions [and learned] that the only life they have is a link with weapons,” he said. “They are finding ways of living by the gun … either you are a rebel with the army, or you end up as a mercenary, kidnapper, in banditry or Boko Haram.”

The perpetrators have thrived partly because of weak state governance architecture but also because of spaces – and forests – that serve as criminal hideouts. Combined, the three countries in the corridor account for almost a tenth of the area of Africa but only 4% of its population. Their borders with Maghreb states, which have local conflicts waged by actors with transnational communal ties, stretch for thousands of kilometres. Worse still, the armies in the corridor are stretched by conflicts at their other borders.

“Chad is very concerned about security on the border with Sudan in the east, so they’ve moved their capacity to better monitor that border,” said Ulf Laessing, director of the Sahel programme at German thinktank the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. “That might be a reason that they are not able to effectively guard the border with Cameroon as before.”

The kidnappings have had an adverse impact on movements of goods, cattle and humans across the corridor. Farmers are also scared to work, leading to rotting harvests and depleting food volumes.

This in turn could “cause damaging economic ripples across the region”, according to a January 2024 report by Global Initiative. “Following the 2023 coup in Niger, and with instability continuing in Libya, Sudan and the Lake Chad basin, Cameroon has become the main trade artery for Chad and the CAR. The majority of imports and exports into these countries now pass through the tri-border region,” the report said.

Last October, service chiefs from Cameroon and Chad met in Yaoundé to discuss a bilateral cooperation to tackle cross-border crime.

But experts say more action must be taken to dismantle criminal networks, including a structured regional collaboration to increase security and patrol remote forest zones.

Until then, the local vigilantes in the corridor are staying alert to protect their families and communities. “It’s dangerous volunteer work and we ask the state for means to [help] us,” Nangyo told Agence France-Presse.