The scene is wearily familiar. It is dusk at a ramshackle military outpost, surrounded by miles of scrubby desert or on the outskirts of a major town.
Suddenly, there is the sound of automatic rifle fire, and hundreds of men arriving on motorbikes, then explosions, screams, fire, smoke. The defenders flee or are killed. The attackers shout triumphant cries of “God is Greatest”.
A few days later comes an edited video clip of the successful attack and a claim of responsibility from the Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, or JNIM, an Islamist extremist group which now controls a swath ofthe Sahel, which stretches across Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and marks the borderlands between the Sahara and less arid zones.
The series of bombings, hijackings, attacks on military bases and raids into major towns in Mali and Burkina Fasocarried out by JNIM in recent weekshave gone largely unnoticed in a world preoccupied by conflicts elsewhere, but marks one of the mostsignificant military effortsby any Islamic militant organisation anywhere in the world since the Taliban stormed back to power in Afghanistan in 2021.
But the recent success of the JNIM may be less a result of its own strength than the weakness of its opponents.
Across theSahel, grinding poverty, instability, sectarian and longstanding violence have long combined to offer opportunities to insurgents, separatists and extremists. These factors have lately been exacerbated by politics. A series of coups have brought military regimes to power in key states worst hit by Islamic extremism, leading to the expulsion of one of the biggest deployments of UN peacekeepers, French elite units and more than 1,000 US troops equipped with dozens of surveillance drones from the region.
Earlier this month, theRussian mercenarieswho had been brought in by Mali’s military rulers to help their forces fight JNIM abandoned a brutal campaign in which they had suffered heavy casualties – and been implicated in the massacre of thousands of civilians.
Ulf Laessing, who runs the Sahel programme of Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation from the Malian capital, Bamako, described the JNIM as a “ghost enemy” that appears out of nowhere in force.
“By the time the government forces react, they can’t reach the real bad guys so take revenge on civilians and that is a major driver of recruitment,” he said.
Such atrocities arerepeated by militaries across the regionand have fuelled support for the JNIM, particularly in communities systematically targeted as supposed “supporters of terrorism”. AUN survey in 2017underlined the link between radicalisation and abuses by authorities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Though security has deteriorated across the Sahel, aid programmes have been cut back or ended. President Trump’s recent decision to slash foreign assistance has curtailed more. Western diplomats and NGOs have also withdrawn, or been expelled, along with soldiers.
JNIM and other militants have exploited the vacuum that has opened up, offering protection and some basic services as well as coercing communities into accepting their authority and strict Islamically inspired rules. Expansion also means resources. Control of roads means traffic can be taxed, for example.
“JNIM are becoming a force that is well beyond just military … Villagers see no other option. JNIM run courts, schools, informal goldmines. They are very pragmatic, and not corrupt,” said Laessing.
This broad social approach was pioneered by al-Qaida, to which JNIM may owe a tenuous loyalty, after Ayman al-Zawahiri took over as leader after the death in 2011 of its founder, Osama bin Laden. It has had mixed success but has been effective in parts of sub-SaharanAfrica, especially the Sahel.
Aneliese Bernard, a Washington-based expert and former US official in the region, said local actors were key to the JNIM expansion into littoral states.
“It’s a hybrid of spillover and homegrown … JNIM’s strategic approach is to do prospecting. They pay marginalised youth, often from Fulani communities or teenage girls, to provide intelligence on local security forces and communities which might be open to approach but the homegrown jihadist cells now linked to JNIM probably would have emerged on their own,” Bernard said.
The group may have other ambitions, too. A leader and spokespersonrecently boastedthat the group had launched a “second phase” of its war against local states and would be hunting its enemies “in the big cities … in your last refuges”.
One possibility, analysts said, is that JNIM is preparing a radical shift, inspired by the success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which seized power in Syria after Ahmed al-Sharaa, its leader, moderated his organisation’s ideology and focused on governance rather than holy war.
Such a victory may be distant, but there is no doubting who has the momentum in the Sahel.
“We are seeing the impact of many years of decline … but it is now very clear that the situation has degraded very steeply,” said Andrew Lebovich, an expert in the Sahel at the Clingendael Institute, The Hague. “Things are really quite bad at the moment, to say the least.”