This week, the Canadian government announced it would finally be contributing troops as part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali.

The March 19 announcement by Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland comes after several political and military visits to Mali, identified as a possible theatre for the deployment of Canada’s blue helmets, and neighbouring countries since early 2016, after the Trudeau government was elected, pledging new contributions to UN peacekeeping efforts.

The goal of these visits was to assess the needs in Mali and how Canada can have an impact on the country’s stability, but it is very unlikely that those needs will be met by Canada’s projected deployment of two Chinook transport helicopters and four Griffon attack helicopters, along with the estimated 250 troops it may be sending to Gao, Mali.

Since 2012, Mali has been in the throes of a complex civil war involving a vast array of actors, ranging from ethnic self-defence groups to Islamist terrorist factions. The signing of a peace agreement in 2015 between the government and two rebel coalitions has done little to improve the security conditions for local populations. Worse, the violence that was mainly localized to the northern regions (Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu) has progressively spread to the country’s central regions (Mopti and Ségou) and spilled over to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger. The government’s hold over territory has diminished over the last five years, as several parts of the centre of the country have fallen under the control of local Islamist factions affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and been excluded from the peace process. This is despite the presence of a French counter-terrorism operation in the Sahel (called Operation Barkhane), a 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission in Mali (MINUSMA) and the progressive deployment of a regional joint force (the G5 Sahel — Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger) to deal with the spread of the Islamist insurgency.