Ivory’s former Prime Minister Guillaume Soro announced on Sunday evening that he would put an end to exile which began in 2019.

Guillaume Soro led the rebellion that controlled the northern half of the country in the 2000s, had militarily supported Alassane Ouattara’s rise to power during the post-electoral crisis of 2010-2011, when the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, refused to concede defeat.

Soro then went into exile, and an Ivorian court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment in 2021. Soro was head of an insurgency that controlled the northern half of Ivory Coast in the early 2000s.

He provided crucial military support to Ouattara in his tussle with the then president, Laurent Gbagbo, who was ousted in 2011 after a brutal post-election conflict. Soro then became Ouattara’s first prime minister and in 2012 was named speaker of the National Assembly.

Soro was also sentenced in April 2020 to 20 years’ jail for handling embezzled public funds.