Last information I saw showed French carriers were docked in Toulon getting serviced. France has absolutely no way of projecting to Niger in a protracted campaign. The whole region is a powderkeg right now and throwing sparks into it will cascade violence through all of their other shit tier unstable vassals and likely make the situation worse. France was already losing to the "Islamic Terrorist" threat in the Sahel for the past decade, starting a war would fracture the region in the same manner that we saw during the "Arab Spring" in 2011, infinite fractals of minor warlords and Islamic terrorist groups devouring the countryside leaving a few pockets of centralized government that the UN has to perpetually maintain.