The jihadist group Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) has been targeting supply routes into Mali’s capital, Bamako, disrupting fuel deliveries in particular. It has made daily life for the city’s four million residents extremely difficult.
“Schools are closed, electricity is now a thing of the past, and Western and Asian countries are warning their citizens to leave Mali,” Amadou Issa, a Malian professor of French living in Morocco, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Mali, he added, is just one of many instances of underdeveloped states in Africa. “In Africa you can find 30 or 40 stories of failure, while only a few countries are stable and have hope for growth,” he said in fluent Arabic, having graduated from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he studied at the Faculty of Languages and Translation.
Since the emergence of jihadist movements in the early 1990s, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and Mauritania have faced repeated onslaughts by Islamist extremist groups bent on overthrowing their governments. Some of those groups, which have been designated terrorist organisations by African and Western states, have seized control of large swathes of territory.
Their rise has been aided by widespread poverty, the failure of post-independence states across most of the continent, and separatist movements in nearly every country. African Sahel and Sahara states, from Chad to Mauritania, have all been compelled to do battle with extremist militias, meeting with limited success. In Mali, for instance, extremists are allied with the predominantly Tuareg-led independence movement in Azwad, the northern region of Mali. They declared a “State of Azwad,” but they were soon defeated by the Malian army, backed by France.
In 2017, five Al-Qaeda aligned groups – Ansar Dine, Ansar Al-Islam, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Al-Murabitun, and the Macina Battalion – merged to form Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM). According to the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC), the unified Al-Qaeda franchise, JNIM, has carried out operations across all the Sahel states, as well as in Togo, Benin, and Côte d’Ivoire.
JNIM is led by Iyad Ag Ghaly, who founded the Tuareg-led Ansar Din. A former Malian diplomat, it was he who led the Tuareg insurgency that resulted in the short-lived Azwad state in 2014. His deputy is Amadou Koufa, from the Fulani ethnic group.
According to GI-TOC, JNIM is run by a central command, which directs local branches across the Sahel. It has recruited thousands of young men with no economic prospects in what has been ranked one of the world’s poorest regions.
For two decades, elected civilian governments were unable to contain the jihadist threat, even with French support. This is among the reasons why societies in Sahel states have accepted the spate of military coups since 2020. Yet, none of the new military rulers have managed to eliminate the threat, as exemplified by JNIM’s indirect blockade, with its frequent attacks on fuel convoys during the past two months.
“It’s unlikely that Bamako will fall to the jihadists,” Issa said. “But the loss of secure access to vital fuel supplies has stirred fears of internal collapse within the capital. A military coup might topple the current junta, but this would only weaken the central authority.”
States across the Sahel lack legitimacy in the eyes of their predominantly young populations. “There are no jobs. There is no political or judicial justice. There are growing ethnic tensions caused by marginalisation and secessionist calls. All of these factors help extremist groups recruit young people.”
For many years, the Nigeria-based Boko Haram held the title of the deadliest jihadist organisation. That distinction has now passed to JNIM. According to the BBC, the first half of 2025 saw a major surge in JNIM attacks. During that period, the group claimed responsibility for more than 280 attacks in Burkina Faso – twice the number of attacks during the same period in 2024.
JNIM has killed around 1,000 people across the Sahel since last April, mostly security personnel and militiamen fighting alongside government forces, according to BBC Monitoring. About 800 of these deaths occurred in Burkina Faso, 117 in Mali, and 74 in Benin.
JNIM engages in cattle theft in Mali, which is one of the world’s leading livestock exporters. Before this, one of the groups’ main sources of income was kidnapping foreigners for ransom. Recently, five Egyptian nationals were reported to have been kidnapped and held for ransom in Mali.
The African Sahel spans more than 10 million square km and is home to over 150 million people. It is an extremely arid region, most of which is desert: the Great Sahara. Yet, as many Western sources have noted, it also contains significant deposits of mineral wealth, including gold and uranium.
Most Sahel countries gained their independence during the first wave of African decolonisation: Sudan (along with Egypt) in 1956, and Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania in 1960. Apart from British-ruled Sudan, all were former French colonies.
In their post-independence periods, ethnic and tribal divisions tended to drive the new states towards authoritarian forms of government, perceived as necessary to avert collapse. When civilian governments failed, military coups followed.
By the 1970s, Sahel economies had collapsed. Exports of cotton and other raw materials declined, while oil prices soared after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. In the 1980s, the Great Famine devastated the Sahel region, and many of these states never recovered. Then, with the 1990s, the Islamist extremism threat surged, starting with the Jihad Organisation in 1991. Around that time, too, the Tuareg in Azwad began to press for independence or, at least, substantive autonomy.
In 2014, the G5 Sahel states formed a joint force of 5,000 troops. However, it was significantly weakened after Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso withdrew. While the Mali government, with French support since 2012, achieved some limited successes, it failed to prevent JNIM’s expansion. The “Africa Corps” (the successor to the Wagner group) has been equally unsuccessful in helping Sahel states stem the jihadist tide.
“We need a political solution,” Issa stressed. “Neither regular armies, nor Western or Russian support, nor volunteer militias have managed to eradicate the jihadist threat.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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