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For the past decade, increasing instability in the Sahel and Sahara region has been a source of growing concern in Europe and the United States. Western governments have worried that the weakness of state control in the area would allow al-Qaeda in the Islamist Maghreb (AQIM) and other jihadist organizations to expand their influence and establish safe havens in areas outside government control. Such fears appear to have been vindicated by the recent takeover of northern Mali by AQIM and organizations closely associated with it.

Western governments have focused heavily on AQIM’s presence, providing technical assistance in an attempt to strengthen the capacity of the security sectors and justice systems to combat the group. But Western governments have underestimated, if not ignored, the destabilizing impact of organized crime in the region. AQIM itself is in part a criminal network, kidnapping Western nationals with the double aim of extorting ransoms and freeing the group’s imprisoned members. And up until Mali’s military coup of March 2012, state complicity with organized crime was the main factor enabling AQIM’s growth and a driver of conflict in the north of the country. Actors involved in organized crime currently wield decisive political and military influence in northern Mali.

Actors involved in organized crime currently wield decisive political and military influence in northern Mali.

As they have in the past, Sahel governments will be tempted to use organized crime as a political resource by allowing their allies to benefit from criminal activities—which has clear implications for policy. Concentrating on capacity building in the judicial and security sector is the right approach only if governments stand behind efforts to combat criminal networks. Donors should thus focus more on political engagement, encouraging strategies that make the political accommodation of influential players contingent upon their disengagement from the illicit economy and commitment to containing drug and weapons smuggling. This will be especially difficult in Mali, where the government will have to strike deals with local forces, including temporary alliances with at least some of the north’s criminal networks, to gain back control of the territory. The challenge is ensuring that a settlement of the conflict there does not consolidate the power of criminal networks and expand their ability to operate.

But with few alternative sources of income in the region and none that can rival the gains to be made from criminal activity, taking strong steps to break up criminal networks could do more harm than good. The best external actors can do is to help incrementally weaken the networks in Mali’s north by developing a coherent international approach to limiting ransom payments, one of AQIM’s main sources of funding, and to help strengthen regional cooperation.

The Growing Impact of Organized Crime

Over the past decade, the United States and Europe have become increasingly focused on security in the Sahel and Sahara region—defined here as Mauritania, Mali, and Niger, as well as adjacent areas in Algeria and Libya—for fear that the territory could become a new safe haven for extremist groups linked to al-Qaeda. These fears appeared to have been borne out by the 2012 insurgency in northern Mali that saw northern cities fall under the control of two groups closely linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—Ansar Eddine and the Movement for Tawhid and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO).

Meanwhile, the growth of organized criminal activity in the region received much less attention. External observers and Malian government officials readily acknowledged the importance of drug trafficking, but focused above all on the involvement of AQIM while ignoring or downplaying the links of state officials and political leaders to criminal networks. Moreover, Western policymakers primarily perceived the regional al-Qaeda franchise as a terrorist group, despite the fact that its most notorious activity consisted of abducting foreign nationals to extort ransoms.

In order to understand the crisis in northern Mali and more broadly the growing instability of the region it is necessary to go beyond the role of AQIM and other jihadist organizations. Rivalries over the control of smuggling and state officials’ tolerance of criminal activity by political allies allowed extremist groups to flourish. The complicity and involvement of Malian officials, and the willingness of Western governments to pay ransoms, also caused the kidnapping industry to thrive. Moreover, these factors were key to the dynamics that caused the eruption of renewed conflict in northern Mali in 2012.

The importance of organized criminal activity in the Sahel-Sahara region stems from the fact that there are few alternative activities that produce similar profits and rapid enrichment.

Researching organized crime is a task fraught with problems and pitfalls. In the Sahel, accusations and rumors about the actors involved abound, but little hard evidence is available. In various interviews the author carried out in Nouakchott and Bamako in July 2012, interlocutors were quite willing to make accusations against specific individuals, who were in most cases players in the conflict in northern Mali. Though it was often difficult to establish whether the accusations were valid or were weapons used to discredit political enemies, triangulation of information provided by multiple sources from different political backgrounds and with different agendas allows the author to feel reasonably confident of the accuracy of this analysis. Unless otherwise noted, the conclusions made here are based on those conversations and research in Mauritania and Mali, in addition to research in Libya in 2012.

The Rise of Organized Crime in the Sahel

The Sahel and Sahara region is far from a pivotal area for transnational organized crime. The importance of organized criminal activity there stems from the fact that there are few alternative activities that produce similar profits and rapid enrichment. This particularly applies to three undertakings that have expanded significantly since around 2003: smuggling of Moroccan cannabis resin, cocaine smuggling, and kidnapping for ransom. Individuals and networks involved in these activities have converted their wealth into political influence and military power. Contraband trade in licit goods, which had developed across the region in previous decades, laid the institutional basis for the development of these high-profit activities.

The Origins and Evolution of Illicit Regional Flows

While the bulk of commercial flows across the Sahara are in licit goods, which often rely on informal arrangements with security and customs services, the boundaries between licit and illicit trade are blurred. Long-standing commercial and social networks that are frequently based on families and communities specializing in trade are spread across trading hubs in different countries; those networks have been growing closer since decolonization in the 1960s. From the 1970s onward, the links that had survived the collapse of the long-distance caravan trade in the late nineteenth century began to expand, thriving on contraband of subsidized Algerian and Libyan goods traveling to northern Mali and Niger.¹ 

Like consumer goods imported to Mauritanian ports and traded through Timbuktu in Mali by Arab merchants, these flows bypassed the official customs system in a process that led to the establishment of informal arrangements between traders and officials. In parallel, exports of camels from Mali and Niger to Algeria and Libya grew, often relying on the same networks. While this trade was dominated by Algerian and Libyan merchants, Malian and Nigerien Arab traders increasingly established themselves in the sector.² 

During the 1990s, cuts to Algeria’s subsidy budget caused a partial economic slump, but the embargo imposed on Libya stimulated contraband; in addition, conflicts in Algeria, northern Niger, and Mali turned the region into a major arms trafficking hub. Weapons smuggling was sometimes run by the same networks controlling contraband, as illustrated by the case of Hadj Bettou, who during the 1980s and early 1990s dominated contraband and weapons smuggling in southern Algeria, benefiting from the protection of senior security officials.³  Contraband from Mauritania, Algeria, and Libya continues today and has intensified with the conflict in northern Mali, where supplies in food and petrol now overwhelmingly come from Algeria. The illegal sale of subsidized Algerian fuel to Mali is managed by local officials in the Algerian administration and security apparatus.⁴  The regional trade in weapons has increased as a result of the conflict in Libya and growing demand from northern Mali since early 2012.

Cigarette smuggling has greatly contributed to the emergence of the practices and networks that have allowed drug trafficking to grow.

Cigarette smuggling in particular has greatly contributed to the emergence of the practices and networks that have allowed drug trafficking to grow. The smuggling of cigarettes to North African markets began to thrive in the early 1980s, and it developed into a large-scale business controlled by a few major players. Cigarettes, imported through Mauritania, supplied a large portion of the Algerian and Moroccan markets, while those imported through Cotonou in Benin and Lome in Togo were routed through Niger and Burkina Faso to Libya and Algeria. In 2009, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated cigarettes smuggled along these routes accounted for around 60 percent of the Libyan tobacco market (or $240 million in proceeds at the retail level) and 18 percent of the Algerian market (or $228 million).

The key actors in this trade are legal cigarette importers and distributors, who import their merchandise from free trade zones such as Dubai. The trade is therefore best interpreted as a deliberate strategy by tobacco companies to circumvent tax regimes or break North African state monopolies on cigarette distribution.

This system has led to the erosion of the customs services because of corruption and collusion between smugglers and state officials. For part of its journey, the merchandise is transported in large trucks on the main roads, with the connivance of Malian and Nigerien security officials. In Libya, cigarette smuggling is controlled by networks in the security apparatus dominated by members of the Qadhadfa tribe. In the triangle between Mauritania, Mali, and Algeria, Sahrawi networks—often with the direct involvement of officials in the Polisario movement, which seeks independence for Western Sahara—trade subsidized Algerian goods and humanitarian aid southward and cigarettes northward to Algeria and Morocco.⁵  Cigarette smuggling has also contributed to the emergence of smaller gangs of smugglers charged with transporting the merchandise from Mauritania, Mali, and Niger into Algeria. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who later acquired notoriety as one of the leading figures in AQIM’s Sahelian operations, is widely reputed to have long run a cigarette smuggling racket across the Sahara.⁶  

Like contraband of licit goods and cigarette smuggling, the migrant business also helped spawn the emergence of carriers in the region specializing in off-road transport or in establishing arrangements with corrupt officials. Irregular migration flows from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and on to Europe grew beginning in the early 1990s. Gao in northern Mali and Agadez in neighboring Niger, which are also hubs for cigarette smuggling, emerged as major hubs for migrants’ journeys to Morocco (via Algeria) or Libya.

The emergence of multiple militias controlling parts of the Libyan territory has made the country more dangerous for migrants, who now risk being intercepted in many different locations.

Across the Sahara, the migration business did not produce transnational networks on a significant scale. Irregular migration across the region generally follows a “pay-as-you-go” rather than a “full-package” system. That is, as outlined by the UNODC, one group or network does not typically manage the entire process; transportation and the negotiation of bribes with customs and police officials typically takes place in several separate legs across Niger and Mali, with Algerian or Libyan carriers taking over at the borders. Only in Libya was the control of migration and its profits monopolized by members of one tribe—the Qadhadfa—with close links to the security apparatus.⁷  The emergence of multiple militias controlling parts of the Libyan territory has made the country more dangerous for migrants, who now risk being intercepted in many different locations.

The Development of Drug Smuggling

During the last decade, the smuggling of legal merchandise based on price differentials between countries and avoidance of taxes was supplemented by the smuggling of illicit drugs. Two distinct flows across the Sahel have expanded rapidly, their diverse routes intersecting at times: since around 2005 that of South American cocaine to Europe, including via Libya and Egypt, and that of Moroccan cannabis resin to Libya, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula.⁸  The growth was driven by rising demand in Europe and the Mashrek, as well as by tightened controls along the Moroccan-Algerian border, off the coasts of Spain and the Canary Islands, and in European airports, which made routes across the poorly controlled Sahel region appealing to smugglers.

The cocaine trade from South America to Europe via West Africa expanded rapidly in 2005–2007, and it remains important, despite a contraction after 2008. The UNODC estimated that around 14 percent of Europe’s cocaine—or 20 tons, amounting to a wholesale value of $1 billion in Western Europe—transited through West Africa in 2008. Most of the cocaine passing through West Africa on its way to Europe first arrives in one of the coastal states—notably Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, as well as Togo, Benin, and Ghana—and is then either transported by air or boat. Alternatively, cocaine is sent by air couriers to Europe, including from airports in the West African interior. Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey airports are among the hubs for air couriers, some of whom transit via Algiers airport. These routes remain active, as seizures during 2011 and 2012 at these airports underline.⁹  Mauritania briefly emerged as a major transit country for air, sea, and overland transport in 2007–2008, the two biggest seizures being made in Nouadhibou airport in May 2007 (630 kg of cocaine) and in Nouakchott in August of the same year (830 kg of cocaine).¹⁰  Since 2008, however, Mauritanian annual seizures have drastically declined.

The overland routes across the Sahel and Sahara toward Europe are diverse, and there is little evidence for sustained major flows on any single route. Cocaine is transported from the coastal hubs—in this case, Guinea or Mauritania—overland to northern Mali and on to Morocco, Algeria, or Libya (via Algeria or northern Niger for Libya). Several reports that aircraft were being used to bring cocaine to northern Mali suggested that the overland route acquired greater importance during 2009 and 2010, at the same time seizures along the West African coast declined. By far the most spectacular of these reports was the discovery of a Boeing 727 carcass that had either crashed on takeoff or been set on fire near the town of Tarkint in Gao Region in November 2009. The plane, subsequently nicknamed “Air Cocaine” by the media, was registered in Guinea-Bissau and had taken off from Venezuela. According to the state prosecutor in the ongoing investigation, the plane carried between 7 and 11 tons of cocaine that was subsequently smuggled overland to Morocco by a network including Spanish, French, Moroccan, Malian, and Senegalese nationals.¹¹  While there is no evidence that a transaction of this magnitude was anything more than a one-off incident for northern Mali, there have been several reports of smaller aircraft being used to carry cocaine from the coastal hubs to Mali’s north.¹² 

Since early 2011, however, there have been no incidents in the region that could indicate how cocaine smuggling routes and volumes have evolved since the collapse of the regime in Libya and since the eruption of conflict in northern Mali in early 2012. It is likely that overland smuggling across the Sahel and Sahara has declined because smuggling across West Africa dropped and the overland routes are by and large dependent on the hubs in coastal states. 

In contrast, all available evidence suggests that the other major flow, of Moroccan cannabis resin toward Libya, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, continues unabated. Moroccan production, considered the world’s largest or second largest, was estimated by the UNODC to be 877 tons in 2008. The Mauritanian intelligence services reportedly estimate that around one-third of Moroccan production transits the Sahel states, partly to circumvent the Algerian-Moroccan border.¹³  Cannabis resin arrives in Mauritania overland (via Algeria or Western Sahara) or by boat, and then takes either a northern route to enter Mali in its far north, or it is transported along the Nouakchott-Nema road to enter Mali in Timbuktu Region.

The cannabis resin trade is dominated by mixed networks of Moroccan, Sahrawi, and Mauritanian nationals—as well as, allegedly, Algerian army officers—until it arrives in northern Mali. Across northern Mali and Niger, the bulk of cannabis resin smuggling is run by networks from Malian Arab communities that can often draw on family and tribal ties in Mauritania and Niger.¹⁴  In some cases, Sahrawi cannabis resin smugglers with close ties to the Polisario have been known to take cocaine to Morocco on their way back from Mali.¹⁵  From northern Mali, cannabis resin smuggling routes partly overlap with those serving the cocaine trade, traversing northern Niger or southern Algeria toward Libya. The drugs are then either exported to Europe via the Balkans or transported to Egypt and Israel. Another route runs via Chad and Sudan to the Arabian Peninsula.

Seizures of 2 tons of cannabis resin off Nouadhibou (western Mauritania) in January 2012 and of 3.6 tons in Timbedra (eastern Mauritania) in May 2012 show that this trade is thriving. Instability in Libya and conflict in northern Mali does not appear to have disrupted this route, with 4 tons of cannabis resin seized in Tripoli in May 2012, suggesting that the city has become a major hub for the trade.¹⁶

There is little evidence to support allegations of direct AQIM involvement in drug smuggling. AQIM does not appear to be an actor in reported clashes between drug smugglers in the region. In addition, the link allegedly established by a court in New York between AQIM, the Colombian FARC, and cocaine smugglers does not hold: the case involved an undercover U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent presenting himself as a FARC representative to three Malian nationals, who in turn asserted they could arrange protection from AQIM for a cocaine shipment across the Sahara. There is nothing to suggest that this was anything more than a false claim made to impress their supposed business partner. It is plausible, however, to assume that AQIM, as other armed groups in northern Mali, has sought at times to impose transit fees on drug smugglers or lent its protection to smuggling convoys.

Kidnapping for Ransom

The rise of kidnapping for ransom in the region was closely linked to, and a main driver of, AQIM’s growing presence in the Sahel. Since the end of the Tuareg rebellions in northern Mali and Niger in the mid-1990s, the so-called “residual banditry” affecting the Sahara included occasional kidnappings of foreign nationals for political or financial ends. The abduction of 32 European tourists in 2003 in southern Algeria—seventeen of whom were freed on Algerian territory, while the fifteen remaining hostages were released in northern Mali after six months of captivity—was a novelty both in its scope and with regard to the responsible party. The kidnappings were carried out by the Algerian insurgent Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which in early 2007 changed its name to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. However, the case remained a one-off incident for several years. Excluding an attack on the Mauritanian border post of Lemgheity in 2005, there was little evidence that the group had a significant presence, leading some observers to question whether it was a fact or fiction.¹⁷ 

The rise of kidnapping for ransom in the region was closely linked to, and a main driver of, AQIM’s growing presence in the Sahel.

This changed in December 2007 when four French tourists were killed by AQIM members in southern Mauritania. Soon afterward, in early 2008, a series of kidnappings across the region began. By April 2012, 42 foreign nationals had been targeted; of those, 24 were released, five were killed while being taken hostage or in captivity, and thirteen were still being held hostage as of the end of August 2012. The locations of these abductions included southern Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Niger, as well as northern Mali, but in all cases the hostages were held and released in northern Mali by AQIM or, beginning in late 2011, by the AQIM offshoot Movement for Tawhid and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO). The kidnappers focused on nationals of states that were known to be willing to negotiate ransom payments.

Political motives to spread terror played a limited role in AQIM’s hostage takings. Although political demands were at times voiced by AQIM in messages posted on the Internet, available evidence suggests that all releases of Western nationals were secured through ransom payments, in some cases coupled with the release of prisoners linked to AQIM or MUJAO by Mali or Mauritania. In a number of instances, attempted rescues or the refusal to pay ransoms led to the death of hostages.18 

Reports of ransom payments are never officially confirmed by the governments concerned and media reports vary on the amounts involved, although most range between $1.5 and $4 million per hostage.¹⁹  The only reliable information in this respect comes from the Swiss. In 2009, the Swiss government authorized the use of $5 million in relation to the negotiations over the release of three of its nationals, of which $2 million appears to have been set aside for the ransom payment.²⁰ 

Repeated hostage takings have caused tourism in the Sahel and Sahara to collapse, thereby further limiting opportunities for employment and profit outside of criminal activity.

Kidnapping for ransom has developed into a highly lucrative industry that has allowed AQIM to become a significant political and military force in the Sahel and Sahara. Extrapolating from available information, the income derived by AQIM, MUJAO, and associated mediators from kidnappings is likely to have totaled between $40 million and $65 million since 2008, paid mostly by Western governments. At the same time, repeated hostage takings have caused tourism in the Sahel and Sahara to collapse, thereby further limiting opportunities for employment and profit outside of criminal activity.

The Impact of Organized Crime: Collusion, Corruption, and Competition

The link between organized crime and conflict is obvious in the kidnapping-for-ransom business operated by AQIM and MUJAO. However, tensions related to the growing drug traffic, and the erosion of state institutions through complicity with organized crime, played even more important a role in the dynamics that led to the outbreak of conflict in northern Mali in January 2012. Officials’ collusion with organized crime of all sorts has been present to varying degrees across the region.

In Mauritania, the final years of former president Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya’s rule (1984–2005) saw the high-level involvement of security officials and businessmen in contraband and weapons smuggling. Ould Taya’s rule was based on an alliance between members of the Smacid, Ouled Bou Sba, and Rgeybat tribes, and these tribes’ control of smuggling activity was a key building block in their coalition.²¹ 

The major cocaine seizures of 2007 and 2008 demonstrate the linkages between regime figures and the drug trade. The seizures coincided with a period of political instability, and senior figures wielded arrests on drug charges as a tool in power struggles within the ruling elite. Sid’Ahmed Ould Taya, the former president’s nephew and Interpol liaison officer in Mauritania, was arrested in connection with a 2007 cocaine smuggling transaction at Nouadhibou airport, as was Sidi Mohamed Ould Haidallah, the son of another former president.

The current Mauritanian president, Ould Abdel Aziz, took power following a 2008 military coup, and with the consolidation of this rule, seizures and arrests have receded, making it difficult to discern whether high-level involvement continues. Some incidents have certainly raised eyebrows, including the president’s decision to reduce the prison sentences of five convicted cocaine smugglers in February 2011 and a Nouakchott appeals court’s inexplicable decision to release 30 convicted smugglers in July 2011. While the verdict was subsequently reversed, several key high-level players had fled in the meantime.²²  In another case, a cannabis resin smuggling network dismantled in January 2012 sought to evade checkpoints using special permits allegedly issued by the former head of police,²³  and a retired senior military officer was allegedly linked to a May 2012 cannabis resin seizure in Timbedra. Moreover, the Mauritanian security and judicial apparatus clearly stops short of investigating the sudden fortunes amassed by some individuals in recent years, many of which are suspected of being built on drug smuggling. But there is insufficient evidence to conclude that smuggling is today managed by senior Mauritanian officials as a political resource, as it was during the final years of Ould Taya’s rule.

The boundaries in Niger are similarly murky. Contraband of licit goods and irregular migration takes place openly and with the full connivance of the authorities. Moreover, the fact that seizures of drug and weapons shipments are rare in northern Niger, a major transit area for both, cannot be explained simply by the Nigerien security forces’ limited capacities. At least in some cases, the government has turned a blind eye to drug and weapons smuggling in order to preserve stability in the north.

The most prominent recent example was the release of the former Arab rebel leader Abta Hamidine in March 2012. Hamidine had been arrested in June 2011, following a clash between the Nigerien army and a convoy carrying explosives and weapons from Libya, apparently destined for delivery to AQIM in northern Mali. Also implicated in the case was Aghali Alambo, a former Tuareg rebel leader who had been appointed adviser to the president of the Nigerien legislative assembly (after spending time in Libya leading Nigerien Tuaregs fighting for Muammar Qaddafi). He was briefly arrested in March 2012 and then set free shortly afterward, along with Hamidine, in a move that appeared designed to prevent Hamidine’s and Alambo’s associates from taking up arms against the government.²⁴ 

The collusion also stretched to southern Algeria and Libya. In Algeria, the complicity of senior officials appears to be organized at the provincial (wilaya) rather than the national level.²⁵  In Libya, smuggling was managed by senior officials until the demise of the Qaddafi regime; since then, arms smuggling out of Libya to Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and the Sahel has been thriving and has created vested interests that will be difficult for any future Libyan government to dismantle. Moreover, rivalries over the control of illicit activity have helped fuel violent conflicts in southern Libya between militias along tribal lines.

But nowhere in the region were state institutions more implicated in organized crime than in northern Mali. The former Malian leadership tried to use organized crime as a resource for the exercise of influence in the north by allowing its local allies to engage in criminal activity. It eventually lost control over the conflicts this generated, while the rule of law and the legitimacy of state institutions were eroded through complicity with organized crime.

The State–Organized Crime–Conflict Nexus in Mali

Organized crime truly began to take hold in northern Mali at the time of a rebellion led by several Tuareg officers from Kidal, a northern region bordering both Niger and Algeria, that began in May 2006. While the outbreak of the rebellion was due to wider political grievances, rivalries over the control of smuggling gradually became more prominent in the dynamics of the conflict. The rising profits to be made from drug smuggling spawned a drive by different networks to control smuggling routes or to impose transit fees on smugglers from other groups.

The Malian leadership deliberately exploited these tensions to exert its influence by playing leaders from certain communities against others and relying on select tribes to keep the north under control. To counter the Ifoghas and Idnan Tuareg rebels, the leadership around the then president, Amadou Toumani Toure, allied itself with those rebels’ rivals—primarily leaders from the Arab Berabiche and Lamhar tribes, as well as from Imghad Tuareg tribes.

From August 2007 onward, only a small group of rebels drawn from a subsection of the Ifoghas continued to fight, repeatedly attacking Berabiche and Lamhar drug smuggling convoys. Clashes related to cocaine smuggling played out in 2007 and 2008.²⁶  Sometimes state officials directly intervened, as Lieutenant Colonel Lamana Ould Bou, a Malian army officer with close ties to then head of state security, did in a clash in August 2007 over a cocaine shipment, arranging the return of the shipment in exchange for a large payment.

Prominent Arab figures from the Timbuktu and Gao regions sought to protect their business interests by establishing militias. That stance aligned with the interests of the Malian leadership, which remained intent on mobilizing Arab leaders to fight the rebels. The irregular forces, financed by businessmen like Dina Ould Daya and Oumar Ould Ahmed, were thus temporarily headed by members of Mali’s military, such as Colonel Mohamed Ould Meydou and Lieutenant Colonel Bou.²⁷ 

The relationship between the state, local notables and businessmen, and the drug trade can be seen in the supposedly huge November 2009 cocaine shipment transported to northern Mali by plane. According to an Algerian journalist with close links to the security apparatus, after landing in Tarkint, north of Gao, the shipment was most probably handled by Lamhar notables, including Tarkint mayor Baba Ould Cheikh, who was close to the Malian leadership. Prominent Lamhar businessmen Cherif Ould Taher and Mohamed Ould Laghwinat were also likely in attendance.²⁸