Experts Warn of Insurgents' Paradise in West Africa

General Michael Langley, who leads the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, testified to Congress last month about the threat posed by JNIM. “Our assessment indicates that, if left unchecked, these organizations will continue to grow, and their threat to regional stability, as well as to U.S. national security interests, will only intensify,” Gen. Langley told the House Armed Services Committee.

As Gen. Langley spoke, the U.S. was contemplating a thinning of AFRICOM, following deep cuts to USAID programs in the region and a shift to a more transactional commercial relationship with Africa writ large.

“The situation [in West Africa] might end up becoming so bad that it will be impossible for the U.S. to ignore,” Jacob Zenn, an Africa expert at the Georgetown Center for Security Studies, told The Cipher Brief. “General Langley was urging everyone to begin paying attention now, or else you're going to have to do it later when the situation is worse.”

But because JNIM isn’t perceived – for now – as a direct threat to the West, and because governments in West Africa are either disinclined or too weak to push back, the group’s influence is spreading.

JNIM was founded in Mali in 2017 as a coalition of five jihadist groups, including the Sahara branch of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The group’s leader, Iyad Ag Ghali, is a former Toureg separatist leader and Malian diplomat who is reported to have had a “conversion” to radical Islam during a visit to Saudi Arabia two decades ago.

Ag Ghali was expelled from the Malian government for his links to extremists, and soon after, he united the militant groups under the JNIM umbrella and pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

JNIM began to gain momentum by seizing land and bringing terror to Mali, and then to neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso, in a series of ambushes and attacks against government forces, United Nations missions, and civilians.

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Lately, JNIM’s strikes have been bolder, including a coordinated attack on Mali’s international airport last September, and an assault earlier this year on a Malian military base in Boulkessi, a border post, that killed at least 60 soldiers and wounded 40 others. Burkina Faso has suffered the worst of the carnage – JNIM has carried out over 280 attacks in the country in the first half of 2025 alone, double the number from the same time in 2024. Overall, the group has killed more than 1,000 people across the Sahel region since April.

“Each year we see the lethality of the conflict growing,” Heni Nsaiba, West Africa Senior Analyst at Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), told The Cipher Brief. “Not just in terms of fatalities…but also in terms of the violence that the group employs to achieve their objectives.”

Those objectives differ between JNIM’s factions, Nsaiba said, but all share an ambition to impose hardline Islamic rule, and a willingness to use violence to further that goal.

“Salafi-Jihadist ideology is the foundation of their governance approach,” Levi West, a counterterrorism expert at the Australian National University, tells The Cipher Brief. “Much like HTS in Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan, this means minority, deeply conservative, and militant interpretations of Islam as the system of governance and the basis of laws.”

Experts say the group’s hold on territory has roughly tripled in the last three years, to cover areas of Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso that, taken together, are nearly five times the size of Texas.

“These are vast areas and include vast desert terrains as well,” Zenn said. “It's sort of an insurgents’ paradise. If you are able to hide in the desert and store your weapons in hidden places, store your finances in hidden places, [you can] then force the counter insurgents to come into the bush to find you and then ambush them.”

Poverty and poor governance in the region have helped boost support for JNIM. Experts say a series of coups that brought military juntas to power in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have only made a bad situation worse, as the juntas have used brute force in ways that have boosted support for JNIM.

One expert who asked to remain anonymous given security sensitivities in the region said, “the real problem is that the military juntas in power have decided to double down on some of the heavy-handed tactics that they've used to try to suppress the insurgency.” Those tactics, he told The Cipher Brief, include an “abusive, kick-the-door-down approach” that has driven communities into the hands of the extremists.

As they capture territory, JNIM’s fighters are piling up war booty along the way. Nsaiba said the group levies zakat or Islamic alms on the populations it controls, runs smuggling and kidnapping operations, and has pillaged state stockpiles of arms and ammunition – “basically everything they need to sustain their operations,” Nsaiba said. “All combined, they have a quite solid war chest.”

Nsaiba and other experts say JNIM now has the weapons and warfighting capabilities to capture more land – including cities – and pose threats to regional governments.

In his June testimony, Gen. Langley warned that the group is spreading to other parts of West Africa, and may threaten the region’s coastline.

“Gen. Langley is right to worry about the spread,” Zenn said, adding that JNIM has made inroads in Benin, Togo, and towards the borders of Cote D’Ivoire, Senegal and Ghana – coastal nations which have been relatively safe. “This is the next area of its expansion," Zenn said. “And unless these countries really develop strong preventative measures at their borders, there's a major risk that JNIM will continue its spread.”

West African governments have mounted counterterrorism operations against JNIM. The U.S. has designated Ag Ghali a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” and has issued a multi-million dollar bounty and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has called for a regional response. So far, none of it has stopped the terror.

In fact, the JNIM threat is growing as the U.S. recalibrates its policy toward Africa. A posture that has long included military deployments, diplomatic efforts and USAID programs is now being scaled back, in favor of the U.S. administration’s push to lessen its global military footprint.

Acknowledging the reduction in U.S. military and development aid to the region, Gen. Langley struck a balance in his testimony between the urgency of the threat and a message that West African nations must carry more of the security burden themselves. While he said the U.S. would continue to offer intelligence-sharing and capacity-building help, he added that “The plan is theirs…we don’t push ourselves to invade on their sovereignty.”

And at a May conference with African Defense Chiefs, Gen. Langley brought a blunt message. “Some things that we used to do, we may not do anymore,” he said. “we’re asking you to step up and burden-share with us…Our goal is not to do more for Africa. It’s to help Africa do more for itself.”

At a recent White House summit, President Trump talked about the “incredible commercial opportunities” in the West African countries who were invited to the summit – Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal – and asked their leaders to accept migrants deported from the U.S., a pitch that The Wall Street Journal said underscored “the overlap between the administration’s aggressive deportation campaign and its foreign policy.” Not much was said about the terror threat or the recent U.S. aid cuts, which experts have warned will impact stability in Africa.

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Zenn noted that JNIM’s terror, if unchecked, might actually lead to more migrants seeking to come to the U.S. from Africa. “The ramifications of these capitals in West Africa falling to jihadist groups, let alone these jihadist groups attacking the coastal West African states, as Gen. Langley mentioned, would involve increased migration, human trafficking, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and safe havens arriving for the training of other jihadist militants,” he said. “The geopolitical fallout would end up being significant.

A core problem in building the case for greater western involvement is that experts doubt JNIM has either the capability or the ambition to strike the West. Zenn says the group has avoided attacks against international targets like hotels, in a calculated effort to avoid drawing in the U.S. or Europe.

“It would appear that their primary objective is local, arguably regional, but not global,” West said. “JNIM are detrimental to many things in Mali and the region, but their threat to international security is relatively limited…It would appear that JNIM is really prioritizing the local jihad as their objective.”

Nsaibia agreed that “It’s hard to make the case that JNIM is a threat to the U.S. homeland, or even to Europe.”

Gen. Langley, in his testimony to Congress, said that while JNIM lacked the capability to attack the United States, it might seek to do so in the future.

“Without a persistent presence in the Sahel, we are limited in the ability to monitor the expanding influence of terrorist organizations in the region,” he said in his written testimony. Acknowledging the reduction in U.S. military and development aid to the region, Gen. Langley stressed the importance of intelligence sharing and capacity building to help these nations conduct independent operations against militants.

The China and Russia factors

The case many experts make for greater U.S. engagement in West Africa is less about a threat to the homeland, and more about a contest for influence with Russia and China.

Gen. Langley raised the issue in his testimony, noting that China’s military is outspending AFRICOM about 100-to-1 in African countries. Russia is using surrogates like the Wagner Group (now rebranded as “Africa Corps”) to increase its influence on the continent, and a Kremlin spokesperson said recently that Moscow would seek to boost its security alliances in Africa as Western powers retreat.

“Africa is a nexus theater for the great-power competition [with China and Russia],” Gen. Langley said, and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee that hosted the hearing, echoed the point. “We need to be putting more resources in AFRICOM to combat what China and Russia are doing,” Rogers said, “rather than looking at taking away attention and resources.”

“Africa is a front line in strategic competition,” West told The Cipher Brief. He said that while Russia and China “are highly active and influential in the region and across Africa,” the U.S. remains largely on the sidelines.

“One would hope that the U.S. and its Western allies would take measures to prevent the emergence of a jihadist-dominated area of contingent territory,” he said. “However there seem to be limited efforts being made to disrupt this from occurring.”

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