Series of roadside bombings in northern Benin suspected to have been carried out by Islamist militants

In early February, wildlife rangers in the remote northern forests of West Africa’s Republic of Benin became some of the most recent victims of the Sahel’s long-running Islamist insurgency when a series of roadside bombs was set off next to one of their patrols. After a rescue team in four vehicles arrived to evacuate the wounded and dying rangers, more bombs were detonated.

The attack was devastating. In tandem with another IED ambush just two days later, it left four rangers dead along with two drivers and a French anti-poaching trainer. Twelve more people were hospitalized. All were employees of African Parks, a South African conservation group that manages two national parks in northern Benin, including W National Park, the site of the bombings. In a statement, African Parks called the ambush “extremely complex,” saying it had been planned to cause as many casualties as possible.

The bombings were the worst in a series of cross-border terrorist attacks in northern Benin that began last year and which have escalated in the first months of 2022, as militant Islamist groups operating out of Burkina Faso make ever more brazen incursions into the coastal nation. In the days after the attack, France launched retaliatory air strikes in Burkina Faso, killing what a spokesperson for the French military told Mongabay were 40 members of an “armed terrorist group.” According to the Wall Street Journal, they are thought to have been connected to Ansarul Islam, a group active in Burkina Faso that has ties to al-Qaeda.

For African Parks, the ambush was the clearest sign yet that its mission in Benin has become far more dangerous and complicated than it expected when it signed a deal with the government to take over management of W National Park in 2020. Along with W, African Parks patrols the nearby Pendjari National Park, a 4,800-square-kilometer (1,850-square-mile) wildlife reserve to the south.

Together, the two parks comprise Benin’s portion of the famed W-Arly-Pendjari Complex, a vast expanse of wild landscapes that traverse Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. The W-Arly-Pendjari Complex is considered to be one of West Africa’s most important biodiversity refuges, a sprawling 34,000-km² (13,100-mi²) network of Sahelian savannas and forests that are home to some of the region’s last remaining lions, cheetahs and giraffes. With 70 species of mammals, including around 9,000 savanna elephants, African Parks calls W-Arly-Pendjari the “largest intact wild ecosystem in West Africa.”

But on the Burkinabe and Nigerien side, W-Arly-Pendjari has also become a haven and staging ground for some of the Islamist groups that have caused mayhem in the Sahel in recent years. Eager to escape French warplanes and take charge of smuggling routes, groups like the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) have set up camps in its near-impenetrable forests. For conservationists working in the region, their arrival has been deadly.

In Burkina Faso, by some accounts state forestry officials were among the first targets of militants looking to establish a foothold in the region, both to eliminate prying eyes and to capitalize on local resentment over regulations that prevent hunting and cattle grazing inside the parks. And last year, Rory Young, the founder of ranger-training outfit Chengeta Wildlife, was killed in an ambush along with two Spanish filmmakers while they were on an anti-poaching patrol in Arly National Park, just across the border from Pendjari.

With the February attack in Benin, long-held fears over the prospect of Sahelian violence spilling over into West Africa’s coastal countries appear to be coming true. And African Parks has found itself at the front line.

Both W and Pendjari share a border with Burkina Faso, and the group’s 150 or so wildlife rangers are trained in military tactics and equipped with high-tech gear that often outclasses that of the Beninese army. According to some reports, as militant groups have crept closer to the border of the two parks — and on a few occasions crossed it — African Parks has been tracking their movements, sharing the information it gathers with Benin’s security forces and Western intelligence services.

In research published last year by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and Dutch think tank the Clingendael Institute, African Parks was described as akin to a “counter-terrorism unit” — a charge the group vehemently denies. Better armed and paid than their counterparts in Benin’s military and tasked with defending the territorial boundaries of W and Pendjari, African Parks rangers were said to have been drifted into the uneasy role of a border security force. This position, its authors warned, risked turning rangers into targets.

In northern Benin, a mission that began as one focused on high-end tourism and wildlife protection has taken a perilous turn, as the pull of yearslong fighting in the Sahel blurs the line between conservation and counterinsurgency.

A public-private partnership for Benin’s parks

It wasn’t supposed to be like this for African Parks or Benin’s northern wildlife reserves. In 2018, when President Patrice Talon announced a public-private partnership with the group, it was an exuberant moment. Years of poor financing and oversight of the remote parks had led to a collapse in its wildlife populations, as local hunters and cattle grazers pushed further into its boundaries, degrading the landscape and opening up access routes for poachers. Between 2011 and 2017, nearly 1,000 elephants were killed in Benin and Burkina Faso. African Parks said it had the answer: secure the boundaries of the parks, step up law enforcement, and develop infrastructure for profitable safaris and hunting trips.

“The international collaboration for this reserve is extraordinary, especially because it comes at a time when my government is committed to making tourism a lever for long-term development,” Talon said at the time.

African Parks was founded in 2000 by the Dutch industrialist Paul van Vlissingen. As the story goes, he came up with the idea after a 1998 meeting with the then-president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Vlissingen was concerned about the poor shape of the country’s national parks; Mandela said he had to focus on poverty reduction, but urged Vlissingen to put his money to work protecting wildlife on his own. Thus was born African Parks, a nonprofit organization backed by funding from wealthy donors in the EU and U.S. whose mission is to rehabilitate ailing wildlife reserves across the continent.

Unlike other conservation organizations, African Parks is a one-stop shop. Groups like WWF sign agreements with host governments to manage national parks, but the rangers who patrol their boundaries are typically under at least the nominal command of state agencies. African Parks, on the other hand, maintains its own 1,000-strong force of rangers, who are trained in paramilitary tactics by instructors from across the world, including the U.K., Israel, and France. Governments who contract African Parks to manage one of their national parks have a say in the management plan, but once they turn over the keys they’re expected to mostly step back from day-to-day operations.

African Parks says that maintaining direct control over its ranger force allows it to discipline those who misbehave or abuse local people, helping to avoid scandals like the WWF’s human rights debacle in Central Africa and Nepal. Maintaining good relationships with communities living around the parks it manages, which now cover a staggering 15 million hectares (37 million acres) in 11 countries, is a top priority, a spokesperson told Mongabay.

“What we’ve learned across our parks is obviously you need to have community support,” said Charles Wells, the chief operating officer of African Parks. “That’s a big key of our theory of change, is that well-managed protected areas actually benefit communities.”

But strict law enforcement and a robust defense of park boundaries is the core of its approach, one that’s been described as “fences and fines.” Critics say it’s a poster child for “fortress conservation,” and worry that its emphasis on paramilitary patrols can be dangerous for people entering the parks to fish or hunt small game. The group’s admirers scoff at that criticism, pointing to African Parks’ track record of rehabilitating degraded wildlife habitats, which they say speaks for itself.

One of those admirers is reported to be Rwandan President Paul Kagame. After the group took over Akagera National Park, visitor numbers more than doubled, bringing in tourist dollars and winning praise from conservationists. According to rumor, it was Kagame himself who sold Talon on the idea that African Parks could do for Benin what it had done for Akagera. Not long after he returned from a state trip to Rwanda in 2016, Talon announced it would be taking over Pendjari, in its first foray into West Africa.

Early troubles lead to a ‘turning point’

In the years before African Parks took it over, Pendjari had been managed by Cenagref, the Beninese government agency responsible for wildlife reserves. But after EU funding ran dry, supervision of Pendjari and W withered. Often, underpaid Cenagref agents just looked the other way when local hunters, farmers and cattle ranchers — or in some cases, poachers — crossed over into the park.

“[Cenagref] needed some improvement,” said Etotépé Sogbohossou, who wrote her Ph.D. on human-wildlife conflict in Pendjari and is now director of the environment department at Egypt’s University of Alexandria. “It was a problem. There was a need for a change in protected areas management, and bringing African Parks in was the solution they found.”

Right away, Beninese conservationists and communities living around Pendjari knew the arrival of African Parks meant just that: change. Suddenly, areas that had long been used by villagers for fishing, ancestor worship, or hunting were closed off by armed rangers. At first, even local researchers and their students were barred from entering the park.

“In my time, we didn’t train rangers as a military,” said Brice Sinsin, a professor of agricultural sciences at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi. “We trained them much more as naturalists. But when I discussed with some of the [rangers], they didn’t even know the name of any plants and so on. The system was much more military-oriented than we were used to.”

The new regime startled and angered people living around Pendjari. In a dynamic familiar to conservation projects across the world, some were bitter that the forests they’d been using for decades, or even centuries, were now almost entirely off-limits. According to an analysis by the French peacebuilding nonprofit Promediation, in one incident rangers killed an entire herd of nearly 450 cattle inside the park, incensing the owners and ratcheting up tensions in some communities.

“They had many issues in the beginning at Pendjari park,” said Kars de Bruijne, head of the Sahel program at the Clingendael Institute’s conflict research unit. “The director was really bad and they had lots of problems with communities in 2017 and 2018. But things have changed since 2019. The man