THE FRENCH URANIUM CONNECTION IN NIGER

The French Uranium Connection in Niger

REPORTING | NIGER

On 29 January 2026, armed men seized the international airport in Niamey. Who was behind the attack, jihadists or France? In times of a global nuclear arms and power resurrection—can France (and the West) really afford to allow Niger to nationalize its uranium reserves?

Dinosaur bones lie alongside uranium ore beneath the Nigerian desert. In common, the pre-historic bones and radioactive element were discovered by the French. Both have since become the object of a power struggle that remains unresolved, one that in 2026 is moving ever closer to an open confrontation—militarily and economically.

On 29 January 2026, armed men seized the international airport in Niamey. During the raid, a nearby military installation, “Base 101,” was overrun. After a blazing firefight, twenty-odd intruders had been killed and four people tied to the Nigerien military apparatus had been wounded.

The political aftermath brought reports of jihadists linked to Lakurawa, a militia with close ties to the Islamic State’s Sahel branch. But reports in Nigerien media about a “Frenchman” among those who had been killed at crossfire paved the way for theories that the attack had been orchestrated by Paris—particularly given the attack’s deliberate focus on the airport’s military facilities.[1]

According to the Nigerien military rule, that the Niamey airport had been the objective was a testament to this theory, and meant to weaken Niger’s Air Force.

Abdourahamane Tiani—the Nigerien general who took part in the 2023 military coup—has ever since the Spring 2025 served as the country’s de facto president and has led the swift dismantled France’s political and economic infrastructure in Niger. Tiani speaks of blatant “destabilization attempts.”[2]

Disinterest in the West, global ripple effects

The accusations of France’s “proxy activity” in Central and West Africa—in nations long treated as political and economic free zones for French influence and control—are not new. France has nevertheless dismissed every syllable of alleged involvement, citing an “ongoing information war.” But that does not change the positions of the pieces on the realpolitik board. There, France-friendly nations now stand face to face with nations that have dismantled France’s military and economic presence.

Despite what was at stake, the airport drama in Niger’s capital generated no great ripples in the Western media. No blazing headlines or hastily convened panel discussions about the situation and prospects. The entire regional chess board is increasingly beginning to resemble an actual battlefield, where an armed confrontation that could divide West Africa into two rival military alliances looms.[3]

Developments in Niger are, however, impossible to understand in the shape of brief news items, severed from a broader contextualization. The political storms of the 2020s can only be deciphered through deep historical dives. And as in many cases of neocolonialism, it is a hybrid of evolutionary chance and geopolitical events. What is clear is that it is in Niger where history is currently being written—and rewritten.

The uranium beneath the dinosaur bones

Five days after the attack in Niamey, Niger found itself in the world’s spotlight—at least as a backdrop. Paleontologists affiliated with the University of Chicago published a report showing that archaeological finds in Niger’s Sahara belong to a previously unknown dinosaur.[4]

The enormous carnivore “Spinosaurus Mirabilis” (also called “Nigersaurus”) is believed to have roamed the lush forests bisected by rivers in what is today the Ténéré, a desert region surrounded by the Aïr Mountains near the threshold of the Sahel Belt in central Sahara, some 95 million years ago.

Today this sliver of the planet is called Gadoufaoua (Tuareg for “the place where camels are afraid to go”) and is far more than just another seemingly endless graveyard for fossils. It is also home to the Elrhaz formation, a geological structure established approximately 125 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.[5]

It was when French dinosaur expeditions ploughed their spades and pickaxes into the earth in search of gaping skulls and ribbed tail skeletons that uranium deposits were encountered. It was here, in the French empire’s pré carré (“sphere of interest”), that Paris’s cultural supremacy and great-power ambitions were to be realized by filling museums with large-scale finds and fattening the country’s industry (especially the military-industrial complex) with natural resources (above all, copper).[6]

The latter was particularly important given the growing momentum of the decolonization movement (in 1960 alone, 14 French colonies gained independence), the ongoing colonial war in Algeria, and France’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons.

The Uranium City in the desert

It was also largely French geologists who laid out Arlit, the uranium city that long after Niger’s independence in 1960 continued to embody France’s neocolonial self-image as the self-evident owner, producer, and profiteer of natural resources in its former colony.[7]

Since the late 1960s, French security forces and parallel legal frameworks have acted as guardians of French Orano’s (formerly Areva) uranium mining operations, while Arlit grew into a geographically and economically isolated desert boom town to which fortune-seekers have flocked in hopes of crumbs from the larger uranium cake.[8]

Nigeriens have watched as the uranium mine’s infrastructure has risen out of nowhere, like an impregnable fort guarding an oasis in the desert. Many have begun hacking at the ground with their own spades, unclear exactly what they are after, hoping to share in the riches they know are being extracted on the other side of the mine’s barbed-wire fence.

“We’re not entirely sure, but we’ve heard they’re chipping rocks out of the sand—and then the rocks are transported somewhere else,” says a local Tuareg in the Beninese-American documentary filmmaker Idrissou Mora-Kpaï’s 2007 documentary “Arlit, Deuxième Paris” (“Arlit, the Second Paris”). They themselves see none of the revenues. The “yellowcakes” (chipped rocks containing concentrated uranium) are not intended to provide the local population with income or electricity. At least that was not the case.

New times, new uranium masters

President Emmanuel Macron’s lost influence in France’s “backyard” does not merely provide Paris with a severe headache; it brings equally severe political migraines to the Western world at large. NATO has, within the space of just a few years, lost physical and political control over military installations that, since Charles de Gaulle’s heyday in the 1960s, have been described as a guarantee of a smooth transition from colonial to neocolonial domination.[9]

France has been a military power in this part of Africa since 1898–1899, when the colonial-settler expedition of military missionaries Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine reached the Lake Chad basin via Niger. After a series of bloody battles against defeated local populations, Paris could regard the Sahel Belt as its sphere of interest.[10]

In Niger’s uranium region, French military established its presence in 1916–1917, in the wake of the Tuareg uprising of Kaocen, which opposed the French colonial power’s taxation and confiscation of the nomads’ camel herds.[11]

More important than the French military’s presence near important economic industries in Niger, the army postings set political examples in a broader context—like beacons placed in an archipelago of military installations and later full-scale bases stretching like a string of pearls from the heart of the African continent out to the Atlantic coast.

Changing geopolitical realities

France’s continued military control over these installations has been of great importance to all presidents in modern times. When Jacques Chirac entered the Élysée Palace in 1995, France had military engaged in 23 Francophone nations. The presence of French troops and military advisers—argues political sociologist Robin Luckham—cemented the regrowth of national military structures that, through French francs (later euros), secured a pro-French military apparatus and political structures, ultimately guaranteeing “a permanent intervention.”[0]

Now, that military presence in the former sphere of interest has been shattered, and the question is what will happen to France’s—and NATO’s and the Western world’s—economic and political interests; in short and long terms.

Instead of using ports in Benin, as French Orano has done for decades to transport the yellowcakes to uranium facilities for nuclear use, Niger has now redirected the traffic westward, to Togo and Burkina Faso.

Uranium gives us a telling example of these shifted—yet still hovering—power relations. The Nigerien junta’s new uranium moves have upended both logistically and geographically established routines. Instead of using ports in Benin, as French Orano/Areva has done for decades to transport the “yellowcakes” to uranium facilities for nuclear use, the regime in Niamey has redirected the traffic westward, to Togo and Burkina Faso. Two countries that have undergone transformative political changes in the form of anti-French military coups, and which together with Mali and Niger have formed the Alliance of Sahel States in an attempt to collectively continue combating the countless and more or less organized terrorist groups with branches in the Islamic State, Boko Haram or al-Qaeda that continue to operate in the Sahel region.[12]

Uranium No-Man’s Land

It is clear that Niger’s uranium finds itself in a political limbo and along geopolitically mined routes. The uranium is sought after by the French uranium industry (which asserts its historical ownership over Niger’s assets) as well as by various militia groups (in whose possession the “yellowcakes” risk becoming radioactive valuables on the black market). Meanwhile, in the background, China and Russia are advancing their positions in the region, with their own nuclear power plants to run and arms build-ups to realize.[13]

Uranium plays an important role in the “green revolution” that is said to save the planet from a climate crisis, and in which new nuclear power plants (including in Sweden) are supposed to lead the way.

Uranium also remains in demand by military powers, and nuclear weapons are increasingly normalized in political discussions (including in Sweden), where “modern nuclear weapons” (as during the Cold War) and new atomic stockpiles are to secure the “balance of terror”—and world peace.[14]

Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Niger 2026?

The attacks on the airport in Niamey and the denied reports of French plans for a military intervention in Niger underline the region’s vulnerability and geopolitical weight. As with so much else in Niger’s nearly 70-year history, uranium is present and plays one of the central roles in the growing drama.

Horace Campbell, political scientist and author of Global NATO, argues that it is no coincidence that Central and West Africa have gone through such a turbulent political period over the past ten years. The gangrene, he argues, was planted by the United States under the Bush administration’s assault on Iraq in 2003 as part of its “war on terrorism.” Its consequences were an exploded Pandora’s box of dissolved nations and sectarian currents that soon established themselves in Central and West Africa.

But the real crux, according to Campbell, was NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011. One consequence was that already fragile and economically weak nations invested in military strength rather than social and economic initiatives, which subsequently made the domestic military apparatuses strong enough to overthrow national governments:

“We cannot discuss what is happening in Niger without discussing the African people’s demand that France be expelled from West Africa,” Campbell told Democracy Now! following the Nigerien military coup of 2023.[15]

Niger’s uranium lights the streetlamps of Paris

Developments in the Sahel region in general and in Niger in particular cannot be disconnected from the increasingly desperate and global struggle over natural resources.

It is not entirely untrue to claim that Paris’s streetlamps shine thanks to Niger’s uranium. A significant proportion of the uranium that ultimately generates energy in French nuclear power plants originates from Gadoufaoua, “the place where camels are afraid to go”—the same planetary scrap that Europe presumably counts on sharing its mineral-rich stone blocks if Emmanuel Macron’s ambitions to have France lead the way in seeking a “French nuclear umbrella” are to become reality.[16]

It ishighly uncertain what will happen to France’s access to uranium in Niger. Since the Nigerien junta takeover, piece by piece, subcontractor by subcontractor, a nationalizing of the industry is in the making.

Niger has raised the stakes and is playing hardball. A thousand tons of concentrated “yellowcake uranium” remain parked at Niamey airport—the same airport that was attacked on 29 January 2026— withheld from export pending a legal settlement in which the Nigerien state has sued French uranium producer Orano for environmental destruction. What will happen to France’s access to uranium in Niger is moreover highly uncertain, after the Nigerien junta began, piece by piece, subcontractor by subcontractor, nationalizing the industry.[17]

“France’s worst nightmare”

The coup in Niger in 2023 was not merely the starting gun for what Olive Carlson (see Parabol Press, No.1., 2023) aptly calls “France’s worst nightmare”—it also represented the first gust in a perfect storm that is not only redrawing the Western world’s economic and military control over the Sahel region and its natural resources, but constitutes in addition a radical break with the economic, military and political power orders that have ruled over “humanity’s cradle” for several centuries.[18]

In the Western press, most focus is directed at the Sahel region’s democratic deficit—that it is military coups rather than elections that have launched developments and are driving them forward, that Russian interests and Chinese investments are advancing their positions in the geopolitical “backyard” of Europe, the U.S., and NATO, and that the natural resources which previously had the Western world as their destination are increasingly becoming commodities available on “the international market”, for sale to the highest bidder.[19]

In Niger, Human Rights Watch, among others, points to the military junta’s dismantling of established trade unions and attacks on social movements as an ongoing crumbling of civil society.

Sahel Belt’s “democratic decay”

The Sahel Belt’s “democratic decay” has coincided with increased sectarian violence and fueled an already economically precarious position for millions of people who continue to look northward in hopes of a better life. In Niger, Human Rights Watch, among others, points to the military junta’s dismantling of established trade unions and attacks on social movements as an ongoing crumbling of civil society.[20]

But Horace Campbell chooses to view developments as a natural anticolonial process where what is ultimately at stake is lost Western control over the region, rather than a democratic deficit, which is the primary concern—and what primarily frightens the African continent’s neocolonial great powers. If democracy were the real issue, Campbell argues, we would have seen a consensus, a general line opposing military coup, regardless of country.

“The United States and France are eager to reverse the military coup in Niger. What about the military coup in Sudan? That has received support from the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. What about the Sudanese military’s brutal violence against Sudan’s people who are demanding the restoration of democratic relations? We cannot be selective in our opposition to militarism.”

Futures formed by social movements?

That the region is being cemented as a Cold War-like theatre between binary military alliances is hardly sustainable either in the short or long term; nor that great powers such as the United States, France, Russia and China continue to justify their own expansionary plans with domestic political points.[21]

This is why historian and journalist Vijay Prashad is onto something important when he argues that grassroots voices and social movements must be given a place in reporting and social developments. It is about access to healthcare and education, about securing water supply for millions of people in the poorly drained Lake Chad Belt, and about holding back the sectarian currents that continue to sow devastation, violence, terror and hatred.[22]

Nigerien intellectual circles have, however, been surprised by civil society’s “unconditional support for the military junta” following the 2023 coup. One such figure, security expert and political scientist Garba Abdoul Azizou, does admittedly see it as understandable that civil society displays enthusiasm for the political opportunity for change, not primarily the military junta as such. The fear is therefore that the same civil society that played a large role in the decolonization process leading to Niger’s independence in 1960 is, through its support for the junta, helping to dismantle itself.[23]

Perhaps, then, it is a new civil society that will emerge and begin a new era in Niger’s history, Azizou reasons. What remains unclear, however, is whether its primary backers will be embodied by international great powers, military juntas, regional militias, or independent social movements.

Footnotes

[1] Ewokor, C. & Rukanga, B. (2026) “Suspected jihadists attack airport near Niger’s capital”, BBC (30/1 2026).

[2] RFI (2026) “France denies role in Niger airport attack as junta doubles down on accusations”, RFI (14/2 2026).

[3] France, Benin and Ivory Coast are accused by Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali (whose Russian ties have strengthened in recent years) of “sponsoring” terrorism in the region. See e.g. International Crisis Group (2026) “Islamic State assault on Niger airport tests military rulers”, Crisis Group Analyst’s Notebook/Africa (3/2 2026); Doukhan, D. (2026) “Niger junta calls to ‘prepare’ for war with France”, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (18/2 2026). For background, see Carlson, O. (2023) “Varför kuppen i Niger är Frankrikes värsta mardröm”, Parabol Press (no.1, 2023).

[4] Sereno, P. et al. (2026) “New scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation.” Science (vol.391, no.6787).

[5] Taquet, P. (2012) Dinosaur Impressions: Postcards from a Paleontologist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp.1–10).

[6] Vallin, V.-M. (2015) “France as the Gendarme of Africa 1960–2014.” Political Science Quarterly; Taquet, p.3; Gregory, S. (2000) “The French Military In Africa: Past and Present.” African Affairs (no.99, 2000, pp.435–448).

[7] Garritano, C. (2020) “Waiting on the past: African uranium futures in Arlit, Deuxième Paris”, MFS Modern Fiction Studies (vol.66, no.1, pp.122–140).

[8] Zoellner, T. (2009) Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World. New York: Viking (pp.278–286).

[9] Gregory, pp.435–436.

[10] Guyotat, R. (1999) “La colonne infernale de Voulet-Chanoine”, Le Monde (26 September 1999).

[11] Fuglestad, F. (1973) “Les révoltes des Touaregs du Niger (1916–1917)”, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, (vol.13, no.49, pp.82–121). [Luckham] Luckham, R. (1982) “French Militarism in Africa”, Review of African Political Economy (vol.9, no.24, pp.55–84).

[12] Liguid, G. (2026) “Niger’s seized uranium remains in geopolitical limbo”, Investing News (18/2 2026); Lionel, E. (2025) “Togo may join AES as French influence wanes”, Military Africa (24/1 2025).

[13] This is not the first time Niger’s uranium has been subject to “speculative theft.” Ahead of the United States’ illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein had obtained Nigerien uranium through intermediaries. Claims that were not substantiated then, nor since. See e.g. Cirincione, J. (2004) “Niger uranium: still a false claim”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (28/8 2004).

[14] Johnson, S. (2025) “Sweden unveils bonanza budget to boost growth with tax cuts, military spending, before election”, Reuters (22/9 2025).

[15] Campbell, H. (2023) “Horace Campbell on opposing military intervention in Niger & disastrous U.S./French role in Africa”, Democracy Now! (10/8 2023).

[16] Olech, A. (2026) “A French nuclear umbrella for Europe?”, Defence24 (23/1 2026); see also Zoellner 2009.

[17] AfricaNews/AFP (2026) “Niger military government to sue French uranium giant over environment.” Africanews/AFP (4/2 2026).

[18] Parens, R. (2023) “Perfect Storm: Niger’s Uranium Amidst Sahelian Chaos”, Foreign Policy Research Institute (27/11 2023).

[19] Laporte, R. (2025) “Niger puts nationalized uranium on the international market”, Le Monde, (1/12 2025).

[20] Allegrozzi, I. (2025) “Niger Junta Dissolves Justice-Sector Unions” (11/8 2025); Nwankpa, M. (2024) “Democratic Backsliding in the Sahel and the Myth of Migration to Europe”, Independent Social Research Foundation (16/12 2024).

[21] On China’s presence, see e.g. Nantulya, P. (2025) “The limits to China’s transactional diplomacy in Africa”, Africa Center for Strategic Studies (30/6 2025); on Russia’s presence, see e.g. Bulfon, F. (2024) “Why Niger left the West and embraced Russia”, New Lines Magazine (4/9 2024).

[22] Vaz, R. & Prashad, V. (2025) “The Sahel Seeks Sovereignty”, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (25/8 2025).

[23] Garba Abdoul Azizou (2024) “Niger, is civil society against democracy?” Centre tricontinental (11/4 2024).

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