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Movement for Tawhid and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao)

Sissiko is one of thousands of young people who have grown frustrated at the failure of the Mali government – which was toppled by a coup on 22 March and has been replaced by a widely despised interim regime – to protect its citizens in the north.

Despite a United Nations security council resolution earlier this month opening the door to military intervention to end al-Qaida's hold over the northern region, residents have continued to flee.

Mali, little known or not, now belongs inside the arc of instability that was once defined as stretching from Afghanistan, in the days when the Taliban took charge, through Pakistan to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa via Iraq and Yemen. Now the arc is rapidly extending westwards beyond the Arab lands to Nigeria, west Africa and the Atlantic seaboard. The common denominators are poverty, underdevelopment, illiteracy, mass youth unemployment, misgovernance, authoritarianism, corruption, suppression of women's rights and of human and civil rights in general. All this and western political and commercial meddling, too.

Despite all this disassociation, despite the looking the other way and the simplistic analysis pitting cut-throat, dynamite-wielding Islamist killers against innocents abroad, this bigger story in which Mali's plight is now entangled ultimately involves us all, more intimately and continuously than could any random threat of a terror bomb in Paris or London. A major shift in perception and in action is required. Otherwise, be it indirectly through mass migration, people trafficking, arms and drugs smuggling, epidemic disease, the pernicious poison of official corruption and abuse; or directly through resulting, premeditated ethnic and sectarian, religion-based violence, the nonchalant, unthinking condemnation of a vast swath of humanity to impoverishment, physical, material and spiritual, will inevitably return to haunt the more fortunate peoples of the west.

The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) said they were no longer seeking to expand their area of control, having secured the borders of what the group considers to be a Tuareg homeland. "Our objective it not to go further than the Azawad borders. We don't want to create problems for the government of Mali, and even less create problems in the sub-region," said Hama Ag Mahmoud, of the MNLA's political wing. "We don't want to give anyone the impression that we're gung-ho for the war, so from the moment we have liberated our territories, our objective is achieved, we stop there."

Long-standing rivalries, divided communities and plentiful weapons are convulsing Libya as the interim government struggles to impose its authority and secure peace among the country's ethnic groups.Violence in the Saharan south and in western Libya have shown how volatile the country remains six months after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, who had long played off one tribe or clan against the other to weaken their power.

Gaddafi was always quick to end any ethnic clashes in the desert region and in 2009 he put down a tribal rebellion with helicopter gunships. But Libya's new rulers are weak and often out-gunned by the militias they are trying to control.

Guinea-Bissau soldiers took power on April 12, further undermining West Africa's fragile democracy gains.Guinea-Bissau has suffered turmoil from several coups and army uprisings since independence from Portugal in 1974, but the latest one has also set back western efforts to combat drugs cartels using the country as a transshipment point to Europe.