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Tiani strips five more exiles of Nigerien nationality, taking the running total to 25

Human Rights Watch says a 17 September decree removed the citizenship of five Nigeriens abroad, including a former prime minister. The instrument is a terrorism database created by junta order in 2024.

Gen. Abdourahamane Tiani, who has led Niger since the July 2023 coup, signed a decree on 17 September removing the nationality of five Nigeriens living in exile, Human Rights Watch reported from Nairobi on 22 September. Four are named in the organisation’s text: former Prime Minister Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou, and Amadou dit Ange Barou Chekaraou, Oumarou Moussa Ibrahim and Ousmane Abdoul Moumouni, all former advisers to President Mohamed Bazoum, who was ousted in 2023 and whom HRW describes as arbitrarily detained. The fifth is not identified in the passage. The decree draws its authority from a 2024 order establishing a national terrorism database, which HRW characterises — this is the organisation’s assessment, not a court’s — as having overbroad inclusion criteria, inadequate due process and inadequate avenues for redress, and as increasing the risk of statelessness.

The strongest number in the file comes from the state itself. Niger’s press agency, the Agence Nigérienne de Presse, cited by HRW, puts the number of people provisionally deprived of Nigerien nationality under the 2024 order at 25. The series runs from nine people linked to Bazoum in October 2024, through the June 2026 revocation of the citizenship of exiled opposition figure Mariama Djibrine — accused by authorities of disseminating “information likely to disturb public order, inciting revolt, and colluding with a foreign power” — to the five of this month. “The Niger junta’s use of a terrorism database to deprive people of their nationality without any meaningful legal safeguards raises serious human rights concerns,” said Ilaria Allegrozzi, HRW’s senior Sahel researcher.

Two exile coalitions have contested the decree’s legality. The Alliance of Sahel Democrats — a grouping of Nigerien, Malian and Burkinabè diaspora opposition parties, launched in Belgium in May 2026 and chaired by Djibrine, which advocates a return to constitutional rule — said in an 18 September statement that the decree strips nationality from people still being prosecuted, whereas the 2024 order permits deprivation only after conviction. That is a procedural claim by an interested party. On 19 September the G25-Niger, a coalition of civil society and media organisations formed in 2025, said the order is being used as a tool of political repression against opponents and dissenting voices.

Assessment: Read this as reporting, not as a wire story: it is one organisation’s release, published 22 September and syndicated the same day, with no AFP, Reuters or AP match. The facts are almost certainly right; the framing is HRW’s and should be labelled as such. What makes the file matter is the instrument. A counter-terrorism registry, built by decree, has become an administrative machine for producing statelessness — no trial, no conviction, no appeal that the exiles can reach. That is cheaper than prosecution and harder to reverse. Note also who is being erased: a former prime minister and Bazoum’s advisers, the personnel of the government the junta replaced. The tally of 25 is the number worth watching, and it is the junta’s own.

Three weeks after the Niamey mutiny, the junta still has not named the force that put it down

Russia’s ambassador says Africa Corps neutralised the 29 August revolt at Air Base 101. AP reported ground and air support. Niamey has said nothing on the record.

Gunfire and explosions began around 1 a.m. on 29 August at Air Base 101, the military installation at Diori Hamani International Airport in Niamey. It was the third attack on the capital this year — after a January raid by an Islamic State affiliate and a June attack by al-Qaeda’s Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin — and the first to come from inside the armed forces. What happened next is established through three foreign channels and none Nigerien. The Associated Press reported that Russia’s Africa Corps provided ground and aerial support to forces loyal to the government. Russia’s ambassador to Niger, Viktor Voropayev, told Russian media that Niger had requested support and that the mutineers were “neutralized, particularly thanks to the intervention” of Africa Corps. Nigerien authorities, as of the last reporting available, had not commented.

A fresh analytical accounting was published this week by Africa Defense Forum, a magazine put out by US Africa Command — a disclosure that bears stating, not a reason to discard the piece. It carries the sharpest line on record: “The regime ultimately relied on support from Russia’s Africa Corps to put down the mutiny,” wrote Héni Nsaibia, West Africa senior analyst at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, in a 1 September analysis. Nsaibia judged the regime would likely divert resources from fighting jihadist groups to monitoring internal threats, and that a purge would further weaken cohesion in the Nigerien military. Abdel Nasser Elyessa, of the Institute for Strategic Studies at the International Academy for the Fight Against Terrorism in Côte d’Ivoire, called the use of mercenaries to resolve a problem inside the military “unprecedented” and said it exposed Africa Corps’s failure to make gains against the insurgency.

Niamey is the second such intervention this calendar year. In May, Russian forces helped quell attacks by jihadist groups and rebels across junta-led Mali. The Senegal-based Timbuktu Institute for Peace Studies writes that events in Niamey “highlight the vulnerabilities of a regime whose stability increasingly relies on a Russian partnership,” and asks how far the pursuit of strategic autonomy can go when it is accompanied by growing dependence on Moscow. Nathaniel Powell, West Africa analyst at Oxford Analytica, argues that Russia’s success in keeping juntas in power bolsters Moscow’s appeal to other African governments; Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said recently that Russia stands ready to support African states against terrorism.

Assessment: The silence is the story. A government that took power promising sovereignty cannot say aloud who rescued it, because saying it would define the relationship precisely. Note what is claim and what is event: the mutiny is confirmed, the Russian role rests on Moscow’s own envoy, an AP report and ACLED’s assessment, and no Nigerien decree, communiqué or press conference has corroborated it. Two further absences matter. Nsaibia forecast a purge; three and a half weeks on, no arrests, retirements or command reshuffle at Base 101 has surfaced publicly. And if resources shift to internal surveillance, the beneficiaries are JNIM and Islamic State Sahel Province. Regime protection and counter-insurgency are drawing on the same thin force.

Mali marks independence with its fuel routes contested and its northern map in question

Al Jazeera reports the 66th anniversary against a blockade on supply corridors into Bamako and growing coordination between JNIM and the Tuareg-led FLA.

Mali marked its 66th independence anniversary on Tuesday, in a feature filed from Bamako by Al Jazeera’s Mubarak Aliyu. The report sets the occasion against two pressures: a fuel blockade that has exposed the vulnerability of the supply routes into the capital, and, in the north, separatist and armed groups increasingly coordinating against the state — leaving the government facing questions over how much territory it can effectively control. The dated markers are recent. On 10 September, JNIM attacked an army camp at Dioura in central Mali. That followed an April offensive in which JNIM and the Tuareg-led Azawad Liberation Front, which seeks greater autonomy or independence for northern Mali, mounted coordinated attacks on military and strategic sites in Bamako, Kati, Mopti, Gao and Kidal. JNIM has targeted fuel tankers and the highways linking Mali with Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.

“The alliance between JNIM and FLA poses a threat to the government’s consolidation of national territory, which is a key goal of the military,” Beverly Ochieng, senior analyst at Control Risks, told Al Jazeera. She added that periodic confrontations between the JNIM–FLA coalition and government forces will continue to undermine a political settlement, and warned of the risk of hardline stances from both the military government and the armed groups that would complicate re-establishing a peace deal. The word “alliance” is doing considerable work here, and it rests on one risk-consultancy analyst plus the April coordination. Coordinated timing is not the same as a command relationship; on the evidence currently public, coordination is what can be said.

Assessment: Watch the tense. Al Jazeera writes the blockade as a present condition; Malian and pan-African outlets recorded it lifting in Bamako in early August, and by 3 September described fuel and electricity as available in the capital but erratic elsewhere. Both can be true — a blockade that tightens and slackens is still a blockade — but nobody should carry “Bamako under siege” as a live fact without a datapoint from this week, and this desk does not have one. No fuel price, no queue length, no convoy count more recent than three weeks. That absence is the most consequential gap on the file: whether the interdiction of the Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire corridors is intensifying or easing determines what Bamako’s 67th anniversary looks like.