SerpApi.Org
President Donald Trump is now considering waging another war—this time in the West African country of Mali.
The Trump administration is looking to strike an al-Qaeda-affiliated group known as JNIM, the Washington Post has reported, citing current and former U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.
If approved, it would mark the eighth country that Trump, who has dubbed himself “president of peace,” has ordered strikes on in his second term.
But senior U.S. officials are reportedly in disagreement on whether they should actually attack the militant group. Trump’s National Security Council’s senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, is the most vocal advocate for striking them, the Post reported.
In recent years, Mali has seen bouts of violence by Islamist militant groups from the country’s own government and the Russian mercenaries whom the government hired to get the country under control.
The militant groups, in particular the JNIM, which the administration is considering striking, have grown increasingly powerful and have turned the nation into a terrorism hotspot.
The White House told the Post that the U.S. has been urging North and West African governments “to purchase U.S. equipment and services to support their war efforts against the terrorists.”
“We urge regional partners and NATO allies to support the Alliance of Sahel States in their war against JNIM and ISIS,” the official added.
The Daily Beast did not receive a response from the Pentagon when reached for comment.
A new skirmish in Africa comes as Trump has repeatedly boasted that he has ended eight wars during his second administration.
Trump has claimed he has ended conflicts between Israel and Hamas, Pakistan and India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia, Cambodia and Thailand, and Serbia and Kosovo.
In reality, several of these conflicts were not full-fledged wars, nor have they been completely resolved.
Before his war with Iran, the president had also been claiming that he ended conflicts between Israel and Iran, but those claims have gone away after Israel and the U.S. together launched strikes on the country starting on Feb. 28.
Potential military action in Mali would only add to the list of countries Trump has ordered strikes against, which includes Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria and Venezuela, whose former president the administration kidnapped in January.
Trump has also threatened to take several places by force, but those have not materialized.
These include Greenland, Canada, Cuba, the Gaza Strip, which he has called an “oceanfront property” and the “Riviera of the Middle East,” and Panama, to gain control of the Panama Canal.
