Chad dictator's death spells chaos in Islamist terror’s new ground zero | Simon Tisdall

The west backed military solutions across the Sahel. With the death of President Idriss Deby, that strategy is helping to destabilise the region

The death in battle last week of Chad's unloved dictator, Idriss Deby, has pushed the Sahel up the west's political and media agenda. The sudden burst of interest is unlikely to last. The global attention span for this desperately poor, unstable and ill-governed region is chronically short. And yet the Sahel is, or soon could be, everyone's problem.

A vast, arid swath of sub-Saharan Africa that comprises Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania and Burkina Faso (the so-called G5 Sahel), plus parts of neighbouring countries, the Sahel is where the world's toughest challenges collide. The spread of jihadist terrorism, claiming record numbers of lives and posing a possible threat to Europe, is the most closely watched phenomenon.