Sahel in Flames: the Terrorist Inferno engulfing West Africa
The Sahel is on fire. With Ukraine and the Middle East consuming the world’s attention, the massive humanitarian catastrophes unfolding across this narrow strip of land in northern Africa are falling outside the global spotlight. But even among conflicts in the Sahel, the Mali-Burkina Faso-Niger insurgencies have received particularly little attention. Apathy has allowed the decade-old conflict to fester, killing tens of thousands as it slowly spreads and intensifies— plunging over 10 million people into food insecurity.
The conflict’s complexity contributes to the sparing attention it receives. The frontlines are blurry, and the many state and non-state actors involved have shifting alliance webs that even experts struggle to discern. The fighting began in 2012 between the secular, Tuareg-nationalist Azawad movement — which seeks independence for the nomadic Tuaregs of northern Mali and Niger — and the Malian government. However, the Tuaregs formed an alliance of convenience with the Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist group Ansar Dine, also known as Jamaat Nusrat ul-Islam al-Muslimeen (JNIM). JNIM’s emergence in a fertile environment of poverty, joblessness, and state neglect turned the conflict into a regional war, allowing the militant group to grow and spread across 8 countries.
With Malian forces weak and busy fighting the Tuaregs, JNIM expanded its activities across Burkina Faso, Niger, Togo and Benin, and Cote d’Ivoire. Power vacuums also allowed its rival, ISIS-affiliated Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP) to emerge and begin fighting both JNIM and the regional governments. With minimal government presence in rural areas, a bevy of local ethnic militias have emerged, stoking old communal tensions.
While much of the world barely acknowledges the conflict, regional actors quickly got involved. In 2013, France, the area’s historical colonial power, kickstarted a decade of intervention at the Malian government’s behest. While the French Operation Serval dealt a devastating blow to the jihadists, subsequent missions failed to root jihadist groups out. Over the following years, the French committed numerous atrocities, including an airstrike on a wedding in 2021, and were accused of prioritizing French mining interests over the welfare of Malians. The Malian military was particularly aggrieved by French reluctance to confront the Tuaregs, instead focusing on JNIM and ISSP.
Regional African assistance also floundered. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the dominant Western-aligned political bloc in West Africa, sent thousands of troops to Mali alongside UN peacekeepers under the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) mission. But cooperation between French, US, ECOWAS, UN, and government troops failed to restrain JNIM and ISSP, who escalated their attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
Frustration boiled over during the early 2020s, with a domino chain of coups overthrowing governments across the Sahel. Mali’s Western-friendly government was overthrown by a military junta in 2020, followed by an intra-junta coup in 2021. 2022 saw two military coups in Burkina Faso, replacing its Western-friendly government, and Niger’s military followed suit in 2023. The new juntas, motivated by popular frustration with French neo-colonialism and the unabated insurgent threat, have adopted anti-Western and anti-ECOWAS rhetoric while inviting Russia’s Wagner group to fight the Tuaregs and Jihadists. French, American, UN, and ECOWAS troops were quickly booted out by the three Sahel juntas, with ECOWAS even threatening to invade Niger in retaliation, before it eventually backed down due to domestic pressure.
The pro-Russian turn of the Sahel juntas provided the rapidly expanding and autonomous Wagner group with a perfect opportunity to expand their influence. Thousands of Wagner forces deployed to Mali in exchange for a $11 million-per-month contract with the Malian government and access to lucrative gold mines. Wagner’s involvement produced some initial successes, notably the capture of the town of Kidal in Mali’s northwest from Tuareg rebels in late 2023. But Wagner’s divided attention between Ukraine and Africa is creating mounting setbacks.
In June 2024, a Wagner and Malian convoy near the Algerian border town of Tinzaouaten was ambushed by combined JNIM and Tuareg forces. Gory social media footage chronicles the convoy’s destruction, with almost 50 Wagner troops and 25 Malian troops dying and more taken prisoner. Moreover, Wagner has failed to reduce the violence across the region. Analysis from the Armed Conflict Event and Time Data (ACLED) database shows deaths from political violence spiking 38% across Mali in the two years after Wagner’s arrival. Recent attacks from JNIM and ISSP are bolder, with a September attack on barracks in the Malian capital of Bamako paralyzing the city and airport, and another set of strikes 10 km outside of Niger’s capital, Niamey, putting the military’s control under serious question.
Despite the war being contained in West Africa, several emerging trends in the Western Sahel conflict should seriously concern outside observers. The first is the increase in mass killings and massacres, which overwhelmingly target civilians. All sides have been credibly accused of carrying out massacres, including the Malian Army and Wagner, JNIM, ISSP, French forces, the Burkinabe military, and various local paramilitary groups. Reports of new massacres emerge almost monthly, with one incident in the Malian town of Moura seeing Malian forces kill over 500 civilians in 2022. These massacres are often retaliatory, targeting civilians perceived to be sympathetic to the enemy. Fighting also frequently intersects with local grievances and rivalries, making it difficult to discern communal violence from the war itself. Often, even basic information like the number of fatalities and the identity of the perpetrators remains unclear, making it difficult to assess which parties are most responsible.
Another worrying trend in the Sahel war is the conflict’s increasingly ethnic overtones. While JNIM and ISSP are nominally religious, espousing the creation of a unified Islamic state and rejecting nationalism, local realities are pushing them towards ethnocentric messaging and recruiting. In particular, the nomadic Fulani people are joining groups like JNIM and ISSP in larger numbers, with those groups tuning their messaging to attract them in response. The Sahel’s rapid population growth coupled with climate change has hurt the traditional Fulani herding lifestyle, as pastureland is enclosed and water becomes scarcer. Furthermore, many Fulani attribute years of unchecked state violence and marginalization from non-Fulanis to having pushed some Fulani youths into groups like JNIM and ISSP. Most non-Fulanis claim the opposite, arguing that Fulani herdsmen initiated the cycle of violence, and attacks on Fulani communities are merely self-defense. The result remains: Fulanis are so strongly associated with Jihadism that to many West Africans, the war has become the “Fulani Jihad.”
Groups like JNIM are increasingly embracing this identity, especially as locals, many of them Fulani, rise up the ranks. These fighters are replacing the older North African/Foreign leadership helmed by veteran jihadists like the Algerians Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, who lacked ethnic allegiances. For example, one sub-faction of JNIM, the Macina Liberation Front, is led by the Fulani Amadou Koufa, who has now ascended to second-in-command in the overall JNIM leadership. Under Koufa, JNIM’s recruitment strategy has explicitly leaned into Fulani-non-Fulani ethnic grievances, provoking violence against local Fulani and non-Fulani communities alike.
The conflict’s increasingly ethnic bent risks spreading to other nations across West Africa. The Fulani are scattered across the Sahel, from Senegal to Sudan and every nation in between. The social vulnerability and communal violence associated with the Fulani recruitment to JNIM already exist in places like Nigeria, where Fulani militias and herders regularly clash with the military and other ethnic communities. Were Fulani militias across West Africa to coordinate with JNIM, it would drag tens of millions of additional civilians into the crosshairs of the conflict. Increased violence by and against Fulani communities could easily spiral into widespread ethnic cleansing and genocide reminiscent of the fighting in Sudan’s Darfur region. Incidents like the massacre of 40 Fulani civilians by Burkinabe forces in August 2022 show those fears are already being realized.
Finally, the conflict in the Sahel exposes a serious vulnerability among West African countries: inability to coordinate military action in border regions. Diplomatic frictions and low state capacity prevent West African governments from projecting control in their peripheries, something groups like JNIM and ISSP fully exploit. By focusing their activities around the rural Liptako-Gourma tri-border area between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, JNIM and ISSP can avoid direct battles with state forces and force confrontations on their terms. The use of high-powered dirt bikes allows JNIM and ISSP fighters to quickly sweep through villages before retreating across the border, preventing government troops from following them into another jurisdiction. The breakdown in diplomatic relations between the three junta states of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger and the rest of West Africa makes borders between the two blocs especially vulnerable. The halting of cross-border counterterrorism operations between Niger and Nigeria following the 2023 military coup is being blamed by the Nigerian Army for the emergence of a new Jihadist group, the Lakurawas, along their shared border.
Similarly, Benin, Togo, and Ghana have struggled to contain terrorism on their Northern frontiers, bordering Niger and Burkina Faso. Despite recent troop deployments and all three being part of the Accra Initiative — an agreement promising greater cross-border cooperation and intelligence sharing — terrorists carried out 171 attacks in Benin and 14 in Togo in 2023, displacing 110,000 people across Benin, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Togo. The three juntas have agreed on greater cross-border cooperation to combat this vulnerability, announcing the Alliance of Sahel States (ASS), an initiative to integrate the three militaries and pledging mutual defense. However, the success of the ASS alliance remains yet to be seen and the track record of similar agreements creates little optimism.
In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, JNIM and ISSP have developed a potent terrorism strategy which France, the US, ECOWAS, the UN and Russia have failed to counter. By inflaming ethnic divisions, operating along weak border regions, and massacring and displacing unfriendly civilians, JNIM and ISSP have grown rapidly in territory and strength. Their success provides a dangerous blueprint already being replicated by other groups, like the Nigerian Lakurawas and ISWAP. Growing at its current pace, a cross-continental conflict complex spanning the 3,000 miles from Mauritania to the Central African Republic may emerge in a decade. Likely involving many of the region’s 40 million Fulanis and hundreds of millions of non-Fulani inhabitants, the suffering and bloodshed such a conflict would unleash will make the current violence pale in comparison. Additionally, the economic and migratory pressures such a conflict would create will ripple across the world.
