Defense ministers from West African countries approved a plan for intervention in Niger if the coup leaders do not restore constitutional order by Sunday. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has already imposed sanctions on Niger and stated that it may issue a mandate to use force as a last resort if the military does not return power to President Mohamed Bazoum.
Below are the previous military interventions by ECOWAS:
**Liberia**
In 1990, West African leaders sent a neutral military force to Liberia to intervene in the civil war between President Samuel Doe’s forces and two rebel factions. The unprecedented deployment of a regional force, the ECOWAS Monitoring Group, helped restore some security but the troops were involved in a series of human rights violations, according to Human Rights Watch. The number of troops peaked at around 12,000, and the last of them left Liberia in 1999, two years after the former rebel leader Charles Taylor was elected president. West African troops were again deployed at the end of the brutal 14-year conflict, which ended in 2003, with about 3,600 troops under a UN peacekeeping operation that continued until 2018.
**Sierra Leone**
In 1998, a force from the ECOWAS Monitoring Group, led by Nigeria, intervened in the civil war in Sierra Leone to oust a military council and rebel allies from the capital, Freetown, and to restore President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who had been ousted in a coup the previous year. In 2000, the force withdrew and handed over peacekeeping operations to a UN mission. The decade-long war ended in 2002.
**Guinea-Bissau**
In 1999, ECOWAS sent about 600 soldiers from its monitoring group to maintain a peace agreement in Guinea-Bissau, which was at risk of a coup. Rebels seized power after just three months, and the force withdrew. ECOWAS sent another mission between 2012 and 2020, following another coup, to help deter the military from interfering in politics and to protect political leaders. The group sent another contingent of 631 personnel in 2022 to help stabilize the country after a failed coup that year.
**Ivory Coast**
A West African force was sent to Ivory Coast in 2003 to assist French troops in monitoring a fragile peace agreement between warring parties, which effectively divided the country into two for the following eight years. In 2004, the force was integrated into a UN peacekeeping mission.
**Mali**
ECOWAS sent troops to Mali in 2013 as part of a mission to expel fighters linked to al-Qaeda from the north. As occurred elsewhere, a UN peacekeeping mission later took command of the force that year. Militants connected to al-Qaeda and ISIS now control central and northern Mali, and their decade-long insurgency has spread to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.
**Gambia**
In 2017, ECOWAS sent 7,000 soldiers to Gambia from neighboring Senegal to force President Yahya Jammeh into exile and to hand over the presidency to Adama Barrow, the election winner. Jammeh's security forces did not resist the mission, which was dubbed Operation Restore Democracy.
