Niger’s Base 101 holds the AES joint command and a uranium stockpile nobody can sell

On the night of Friday 28 to Saturday 29 August, Niamey’s airport and the presidency were attacked. Reuters photographed a roadside checkpoint in the capital the following day. Al Jazeera reported on 30 August that the military government said it had contained the mutiny, and that Gen. Abdourahamane Tchiani’s whereabouts were not confirmed at that point. Writing for the Egmont Institute on 1 September, Nina Wilén and Yvan Guichaoua recorded it as the third attack on the airport this year and reported that the fighting was primarily between Presidential Guard troops — the unit Tchiani himself commanded until the 2023 coup — and other sections of the Nigerien armed forces. On the evening of Friday 11 September, a decree read on state television named Brig. Gen. Mamane Sani Kiaou chief of staff of the armed forces. No reason was given, AP reported. Who mutinied, why, and what became of them remain unestablished.

Al Jazeera notes that Base 101 houses the general staff of the Alliance of Sahel States unified force. The Foreign Policy Research Institute reported in April that more than 1,000 metric tonnes of yellowcake were sitting at the same Airbase 101 adjacent to Niamey’s international airport, loaded onto trucks that had not moved in weeks. The stockpile is the residue of the seizure of Somaïr, Orano’s Nigerien subsidiary, nationalised in June 2025 after the French group announced in 2024 that it had lost control of operations and filed arbitration claims. At the end of September 2025, ICSID formally opposed the sale of roughly 1,300 tonnes of uranium stored at the Somaïr site, with a market value of about €250 million, according to the French Nuclear Energy Society. Niger set production-sharing rules in February and cancelled an Orano uranium concession on 19 May, per Agence Ecofin. FPRI’s argument is that Niger can seize uranium but cannot sell it.

Assessment: The interesting variable here is not military control but title. An arbitration body’s objection, not a blockade, is what has kept those trucks stationary; the offer to return Orano’s proportional share reads less as a concession than as the disposal of stock the market would not touch. Distrust the tonnage figures circulating in aggregated coverage — one widely carried version is out by three orders of magnitude against every other number on the record — and distrust uranium price and equity-restructuring claims sourced to commercial analysis sites rather than UxC, TradeTech or a producer. That the bloc’s joint command and Niger’s largest frozen asset share a perimeter which armed men contested last month is the fact worth holding onto.