Togo keeps fearful watch on extremist threat from the Sahel

In a makeshift bunker of sacks of rice beneath a tree, heavily-armed Togolese soldiers keep watch over villagers coming and going on foot or bike across the border with Burkina Faso. Only a dry river bed separates the two West African countries. In surrounding fields, peasant farmers are bent silhouettes, watering the sorghum and maize seeds sown before the arrival of the first rains. Soon, clouds will chase away the fine dust of the harmattan, the choking desert wind that each year sweeps southwards off the Sahara. Nothing dramatic, or so it would seem, ever happens at Yemboate, in Togo's far north. Yet less than 30 kilometres away, over the border in eastern Burkina Faso, extremists and...