Ivory Coast’s Yan Diomande.
| Photo Credit: AP

A pool devoid of big teams is set to be highly competitive, while Germany and The Netherlands are overwhelming favourites to top their groups.

Group D (USA, Turkiye, Australia, Paraguay)

The USA team is chasing the American dream. Competing on home soil in the global competition for the first time since 1994, the national side, now led by Mauricio Pochettino, is locked in to Make America Great Again in ‘soccer’.

The World No. 16’s first task will be to get out of a tricky pool that consists of two other top-30 teams but none of the perennial powerhouses — Turkiye at 22 and Australia at 27.

The close win over Senegal and narrow defeat to Germany in World Cup warm-up games should have given Pochettino a fair idea of where the finishing touches to the preparation have to be applied.

Playing in front of jam-packed galleries could be both a boon and a bane. While stars like Christian Pulisic, who is no stranger to elite football, can live up to the heightened expectations, some may wilt under the enormity of the situation. How they tackle battles not only on the field but also off it will be crucial to USA’s chances.

For Turkiye and Australia, the focus will be much beyond spoiling the co-host’s carnival.

Having earned the right to perform on the global stage after 24 years, the European outfit cannot afford to pass up the golden opportunity.

The wait has been so long that Arda Guler and Kenan Yildiz, two of the most exciting prospects in the current squad, were not even born when Turkiye last caught the World Cup fever. Something close to the fairytale run of 2002 — which ended in a third-place finish — will be required if Vincenzo Montella’s contingent is to make inroads.

Australia, a regular at the finals since 2006, is no pushover but is yet to win a knockout fixture. Meanwhile, Paraguay, the lowest-placed team in the group at World No. 40, will be itching to prove that rankings do not directly translate to results.

Best finish: USA: Semifinals (1930); Turkiye: Third place (2002); Australia: Round of 16 (2006, 2022); Paraguay: Quarterfinals (2010).

Group E (Germany, Curacao, Ivory Coast, Ecuador)

Germany was forced to board the first available flight back home after being knocked out in the opening round of the last two editions. Ghosts from the past may resurface, especially for those who had endured the pain first-hand in Russia and/or Qatar, but the 2014 title-winner must avoid the ignominy of three early exits in a row without fuss.

The top-level experience in Julian Nagelsmann’s squad, recent form of four victories in as many matches since March and superior ranking (10) — the other teams in the pool are placed well below the European side — provide the Germans the head start in the race to top the group.

The four-time World champion should, however, be eyeing bigger things. That Germany has flown under the radar in discussions pertaining to title contenders may free up the additional baggage it has usually carried. But it has catching up to do in the overall scheme of things.

First up for Germany is Curacao, the smallest nation (both in terms of population and land area) ever to qualify for football’s biggest spectacle. Adding intrigue, only one player in the 26-member squad — Tahith Chong — was born in the Caribbean island, yet the place of birth hardly matters within the group because “you are accepted into the family once you come here.”

Curacao is home to Dick Advocaat, the 78-year-old who is poised to become the oldest coach at the quadrennial event. The 82nd-ranked outfit will have to punch well above its weight in the Americas to inscribe its name in the history books once again.

As for Ivory Coast, which is back in the World Cup fold after 12 years, it has not got to this point “to make up the numbers or go sightseeing.” The African country is likely to be involved in a tussle with Ecuador for the second automatic qualification spot.

Best finish: Germany: Champion (1954, 1974, 1990, 2014); Curacao: Debut; Ivory Coast: Group stage (2006-2014); Ecuador: Round of 16 (2006).

Group F (Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, Tunisia)

Come hell or high water, The Netherlands has guaranteed itself knockout football in every edition it has competed in since 1974. And it looks well placed to extend that streak under Ronald Koeman, who had donned the Oranje as a player in 1990 and 1994.

The Netherlands, the highest-ranked team in the pool at World No. 7, was sounded a warning in the recent 0-1 defeat to Algeria in a pre-tournament friendly. But the Dutch side is too good to not pass the preliminary test, with Japan being the closest challenger for the top spot.

It has the resources to even be fourth time lucky — it had finished runner-up in 1974, 1978 and 2010 — but consistently rising to the occasion against the ‘favourites’ will be vital.

Although not among the ‘big boys’, Japan cannot be ignored.

The Asian nation came agonisingly close to qualifying for the quarterfinals in 2018 and took centre stage four years later when it topped the group that included Spain and Germany.

So, not many eyebrows were raised after England great David Beckham termed Japan as a potential “surprise” package to upset the apple cart. “It has a really strong team… it could be kind of a secret,” Beckham told ABC News recently.

While Japan will miss the injured Kaoru Mitoma’s box of tricks in the final third, it has the experience and variety to crack complex codes. Hajime Moriyasu’s men may first have to overcome the Swedish challenge to secure a direct ticket to the eliminators.

Despite having a bumpy ride in the lead-up to the World Cup, Sweden possesses the dash of enviable quality that is required to get through to the next phase. With regards to Tunisia, it should play out of its skin to even stand a chance of making the cut for the first time.

Best finish: Netherlands: Runner-up (1974, 1978, 2010); Japan: Round of 16 (2002, 2010, 2018, 2022); Sweden: Runner-up (1958); Tunisia: Group stage (1978, 1998-2006, 2018, 2022).

Touba, Ivory Coast:

When he was a witch doctor, Moussa Diallo would regularly smear himself in a lotion made from a clitoris cut from a girl subjected to female genital mutilation.

“I wanted to be a big chief, I wanted to dominate,” said the small but charismatic fiftysomething from northwest Ivory Coast. 

“I put it on my face and body” every three months or so “for about three years”, said Diallo, who asked AFP not to use his real name. 

Genitalia cut from girls in illegal “circumcision” ceremonies is used in several regions of the West African country to “make love potions” or magic ointments that some believe will help them “make money or reach high political office”, said Labe Gneble, head of the National Organisation for Women, Children and the Family (ONEF).

A ground-down clitoris can sell for up to around $170 (152 euros), the equivalent of what many in Ivory Coast earn in a month.

Diallo stopped using the functions a decade ago, but regional police chief Lieutenant N’Guessan Yosso confirmed to AFP that dried clitorises are still “very sought after for mystical practices”.

And it is clear from extensive interviews AFP conducted with former faith healers, circumcisers, social workers, researchers and NGOs, that there is a thriving traffic in female genitalia for the powers they supposedly impart.

Many are convinced the trade is hampering the fight against female genital mutilation (FGM), which has been banned in the religiously diverse nation for more than a quarter of a century. 

Despite that, one in five Ivorian women are still being cut, according to the OECD, with one in two being mutilated in parts of the north.

Cut and mixed with plants 

Before he had a crisis of conscience and decided to campaign against FGM, Diallo said he was often asked by the women who performed excisions around the small town of Touba to use his powers to protect them from evil spells.

Female circumcision has been practised by different religions in West Africa for centuries, with most girls cut between childhood and adolescence. Many families consider it a rite of passage or a way to control and repress female sexuality, according to the UN Children’s agency UNICEF, which condemns cutting as a dangerous violation of girls’ fundamental rights.

Beyond the physical and psychological pain, cutting can be fatal, and lead to sterility, birth complications, chronic infections and bleeding, not to mention the loss of sexual pleasure.

Diallo would often accompany the women who do the cutting out into the forest or to a home where dozens of girls would be circumcised, often surrounded by fetishes and sacred objects. So it was relatively easy for the former faith healer to obtain the precious powder.

“When they would cut the clitorises they would dry them for a month or two then pound them with stones,” he said.

The result was a “black powder” which was then sometimes mixed with “leaves, roots and bark” or shea butter that is often used in cosmetics.

They could then sell it for around “100,000 CFA Francs (152 euros) if the girl was a virgin” or “65,000 (99 euros) if she already had a child” or barter it for goods and services, Diallo added.

The ex-witch doctor said he was able to get some of the powder recently — a mix of human flesh and plants, he believes — from a cutter in his village.

AFP was shown the powder but was unable to analyse it without buying it.

‘Organ trafficking’ 

Former circumcisers interviewed by AFP insisted that clitorises cut from girls are either buried, thrown into a river or given to the parents, depending on local custom.

But one in the west of the country admitted some end up being used for magic. 

“Some people pretend they are the girls’ parents and go off with the clitoris,” she said.

Witch doctors use them for “incantations” and sell them afterwards, she claimed. 

Another circumciser said some of her colleagues were complicit in the trade, “giving (genitalia) to people who are up to no good” for occult purposes.  

Mutilated when she was still a child, one victim told AFP that her mother warned her to bring home the flesh that had been cut.

The trade is regarded as “organ trafficking” in Ivorian law and is punishable — like FGM — with fines and several years in prison, said lawyer Marie Laurence Didier Zeze.

But police in Odienne, who are in charge of five regions in the country’s northwest, said no one has ever been indicted for trafficking.

“People won’t say anything about sacred practices,” lamented Lieutenant N’Guessan Yosso.

The cutters themselves are both feared and respected, locals told AFP, often seen as prisoners of evil spirits.

‘Just nuts’ 

“A clitoris cannot give you magical powers, it’s just nuts,” said gynaecologist Jacqueline Chanine based in the country’s commercial capital Abidjan.

Even so, the practice is still stubbornly widespread in some parts of the country, according to researchers.

Dieudonne Kouadio, an anthropologist specialising in health, was presented with a box of the powder in the town of Odienne, 150 kilometres north of Touba.

“It contained a dried cut organ in the form of a blackish powder,” he said. 

His discovery was included in a 2021 report for the Djigui Foundation, whose conclusions were accepted by the Ministry for Women. 

Farmers in Denguele district, of which Odienne is a part, “buy clitorises and mix the powder with their seeds to increase the fertility of their fields”, said Nouho Konate, a Djigui foundation member who has been fighting FGM in the area for 16 years.

He said parents of young girls were “gutted” when he told them of the trafficking.

Further south and in the centre west of the country, women use clitoris powder as an aphrodisiac, hoping to prevent their husbands from straying, said criminologist Safie Roseline N’da, author of a 2023 study on FGM which also pointed to the trade.

She and her two co-authors discovered that blood from cut women was also being used to honour traditional gods. 

They are far from the only Ivorian folk remedies that use body parts, according to lawyer Didier Zeze.

Mystic beliefs keep it going 

“The mystic has a central place in daily life” in the Ivory Coast — where Islam, Christianity and traditional animist beliefs co-exist — said the Canadian anthropologist Boris Koenig, a specialist in occult practices there. “It touches every sphere of people’s social, professional, family and love lives,” he said, and there is generally nothing illegal about it.

The trade, however, is “one of the reasons that FGM survives” in the Ivory Coast, NGOs argue, where the rate of cutting is generally falling and is below the West African average of 28 per cent, according to the OECD.

Back near Touba, the former witch doctor Diallo recalled how up to 30 women would be cut in a day in the places his magic protected.

The dry season between January to March was the favoured period for circumcisions when the hot Harmattan wind from the Sahara helps scars heal, he said. 

Staff at the region’s only social work centre say the cutting is still going on but is hard to quantify because it never happens in the open. 

Instead, it goes on in secret, hidden behind traditional festivals which have nothing to do with the practice, kept going they say by circumcisers from neighbouring Guinea — only a few kilometres away — where FGM rates are over 90 per cent.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Workers break cocoa pods at a farm in Sinfra, Ivory Coast. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The discovery of huge deposits of natural resources including oil, gas and gold in the Ivory Coast is pushing the country’s economy in a new direction.

Over the past three years, the West African country — traditionally focussed on agriculture, in particular, cocoa — has leaned into a new role as an oil and gas producer.

Three discoveries of oil deposits in September 2021, July 2022 and February this year, revealed huge reserves estimated at six billion barrels.

The first deposit, called “Baleine”, is already up and running, operated by Italian company Eni. It aims to supply 2,00,000 barrels per day by 2026 and 200 million cubic feet per day of gas.

The Minister of Mines, Oil and Energy, Mamadou Sangafowa Coulibaly, said the country could now have the chance to join the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) group of oil-producing countries.

“Other discoveries of raw materials are also opening potential new revenue streams. The number of mining permits and projects has tripled since 2012 — from nine to 28 — while research permits have increased from 120 to nearly 200 over the period.”

Mr. Coulibaly said the tax revenues generated are already 20 times higher than they were in 2012, at 372 billion CFA francs ($620 million). “The western half and the northeast of our country are full of strategic and critical minerals,” the Minister added.

Ivorian economy is diversifying: President of CAMP2E

“The Ivorian economy is diversifying into everything related to raw materials,” said Cedrick Sehe, president of CAMP2E, an organisation that promotes mining in the country.

In May, the country’s largest gold deposit was discovered in the west, with the potential to be the third-largest mine in West Africa.

Lithium, manganese, nickel and even coltan — a precious ore used to make electronic devices — have also been found in Ivorian soil.

“These minerals are particularly sought after because they are part of energy transition policies,” Serge Parfait Dioman, an engineering expert in the oil and energy industries, told AFP. “They are, for example, used for the manufacture of electric cars,” Mr. Dioman added.

Some have cautioned that the country could fall into the “raw materials curse”, where a focus on extracting an abundance of resources can end up having negative impacts on the economy.

Mr. Dioman countered that “the more diversified your raw materials are, the less risk you have of falling into this trap”. Experts have also warned about the risk of environmental damage. Fears have also been raised over the toxicity of chemicals used in extraction processes.

Meanwhile, in a sign of its changing role, Ivory Coast will host its first international mining industry exhibition — the SIREXE conference — this November and December.