--- title: "Could JNIM Build a Caliphate in West Africa? Inside the Sahel's Most Formidable Jihadist Group" description: "The director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has described them as the most formidable extremist group in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the numbers bear out the assessment. In Mali alone, where the group was formed in 2017, they are responsible for a 300 percent spike in violent attacks and a humanitarian crisis that has left almost 500,000 people displaced, 1.8 million facing food insecurity, and 5.1 million in need of humanitarian assistance.\n\nAnd that is just one country.\n\nIn Burkina Faso, the group has committed multiple atrocities, including in Barsalogho, where they killed over 200 civilians in the worst massacre in the nation's history. In Nigeria, they attacked Kwara State earlier this year, killing a soldier and seizing ammunition and money. In northern Benin, near the border with Niger, they recently overran a base, killing 15 soldiers.\n\nThis is Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, an Al-Qaeda-linked Salafi jihadist group that formed after four Mali-based extremist groups merged with the Sahara Emirate subgroup of Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb and swore allegiance to Al-Qaeda's leadership. Since then, the group's ascent has been so rapid that the International Crisis Group, in a February report, named it the most dominant jihadist group in the Sahel. The central question this article confronts is whether JNIM could go further still and declare a caliphate of its own in West Africa.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- JNIM, an Al-Qaeda-linked Salafi jihadist group formed in 2017 from the merger of four Mali-based factions and an AQIM subgroup, is now the most dominant jihadist force in the Sahel.\n- JNIM is awash in cash, having received roughly $50 million plus $20 million in arms from the UAE in a recent hostage release, on top of ransoms, taxation, and cattle rustling worth millions.\n- By late 2025 JNIM controlled more territory than at any point in its insurgency, besieging Bamako and holding ground in 11 of Burkina Faso's 13 regions outside the capital.\n- Structural barriers — fragmented territory, only about 10,000 fighters, and commanders loyal to local rather than central leadership — make a true caliphate hard to build and harder to hold.\n- Even the possibility of a caliphate would invite intervention from ECOWAS, the African Union, the United States, France, and rival jihadist groups including the Islamic State Sahel Province.\n\n## Building a Caliphate\n\nBefore asking whether JNIM could declare a caliphate, it is worth establishing what doing so actually requires, because while the idea is popular among jihadists, only one group has pulled it off in the modern era. A caliphate, which experts define as an Islamic state of the Muslim faithful, demands far more than battlefield success.\n\nAyman al-Zawahiri, the second general emir of Al-Qaeda, laid out four conditions that had to be met before a caliphate could be declared in the Middle East: first, expelling foreign forces from controlled territory; second, establishing, supporting, and developing an Islamic authority; third, extending the jihad to neighboring secular countries; and finally, fighting Israel.\n\nISIS succeeded where others failed because it executed the first two steps remarkably well. By 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered his speech from Mosul's al-Nuri Mosque announcing the caliphate's formation, ISIS controlled enough territory to make the claim credible, even if most Muslim scholars rejected it. Then it built the structures: enforcing sharia law, managing an annual budget of about $2 billion, and commanding more than 30,000 fighters at its peak.\n\n## The ISIS Blueprint\n\nISIS did not merely seize ground; it institutionalized control. The group required that factions seeking to join nominate a governor, establish a Shura Council for religious leadership, and formulate a military strategy to consolidate territory it could actually hold. That insistence on governance and command structure is part of what made the caliphate cohere.\n\nIt also benefited from timing. The Syrian civil war and Iraqi sectarian tensions created power vacuums that ISIS exploited ruthlessly, opening contiguous space for a state to take shape. At its height that state covered more than 100,000 square kilometers, stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq, an unbroken belt of territory that allowed fighters, resources, and supplies to move freely.\n\nThis is the benchmark against which JNIM must be measured. The comparison is instructive precisely because the two groups, despite both being formidable, look so different on the ground. To understand whether JNIM could replicate the feat, we need to weigh what it has going for it against what it lacks.\n\n## Money, and a Lot of It\n\nThe first advantage JNIM enjoys is wealth. The group recently received $50 million from the United Arab Emirates to release several hostages, one of whom was a member of the Emirati royal family. According to BBC Monitoring, the exchange also delivered an additional $20 million worth of arms and ammunition. This was not the first such windfall: in 2020, JNIM secured around $40 million in ransom for one French and two Italian hostages.\n\nKidnapping is only one revenue stream. The group supplements it with taxes imposed on anything passing through its territory and with cattle rustling. Research by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found that in a single year, in just one district of Mali, JNIM made $770,000 from cattle rustling, suggesting the group earns millions across its territory from theft alone.\n\nThat money matters enormously. In a region where the average monthly salary ranges from $110 in Mali to $150 in Burkina Faso, JNIM can offer recruits wages that dwarf legitimate employment. It also arms them cheaply. While precise small-arms costs in the Sahel are hard to pin down, the region's arms markets run at a fraction of Western prices, especially when weapons flow from looted government stockpiles or cross porous borders from Libya and other conflict zones.\n\n## Coups, Russians, and a Security Vacuum\n\nJNIM's second great advantage is political chaos. When military juntas seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, they expelled Western forces and replaced them with Russian mercenaries, whose record against the jihadists has been, in a word, unsuccessful. Terror attacks have risen significantly since Moscow became the region's main security guarantor.\n\nAccording to Atrocities Watch, a non-partisan civil society organization, violent events by jihadist groups in Mali jumped 70 percent since the May 2021 military takeover, and civilian fatalities in the first quarter of 2022 exceeded any previous calendar year. An Associated Press investigation found the Russians to be as brutal as the jihadists, if not more so. Dozens of people who fled Mali accused the Africa Corps, which replaced the Wagner Group, of heinous abuses.\n\nA Malian village chief who fled to Mauritania told the AP: \"It's a scorched-earth policy. The soldiers speak to no one. Anyone they see, they shoot. No questions, no warning. People don't even know why they are being killed.\" The African Center for Strategic Studies links Malian security forces and their Russian partners to 77 percent of all civilian fatalities, which has driven JNIM recruitment while eroding public trust in the military.\n\nBamako appears to have grasped that the Russian partnership is not working. It is now negotiating a deal with Washington that would let American aircraft and drones resume flying over Malian airspace to gather intelligence on jihadist groups, though whether that happens in time to halt further territorial losses is anyone's guess.\n\n## Territory: From the North to the Capital\n\nThe third pillar is land. Dr. Daniel Ezienga, a research fellow at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, told Responsible Statecraft in October 2025 that JNIM controlled more territory than at any other point in its 13-year insurgency. The group has methodically pushed beyond its traditional strongholds in the north and center, and its ambitions now reach the capital itself.\n\nJNIM initiated a siege on Bamako that brought the city to its knees, controlling the roads leading in and blocking fuel tankers from neighboring countries. The group destroyed hundreds of fuel tankers, creating acute shortages that spiked fuel prices by more than 400 percent, forcing schools and businesses to close while power cuts became routine. By late January, The Africa Report noted that the siege had eased, but residents were unsure how long the calm would last.\n\nIn Burkina Faso, the picture is grimmer still. According to Al Jazeera, the country has rapidly become a JNIM hotspot, with the group operating in or holding territory across 11 of 13 regions outside the capital, Ouagadougou. Between January and April 2025, JNIM attacks produced 512 reported casualties, and because those are only the reported figures from a four-month window, the true toll is undoubtedly higher.\n\n## A Mogadishu-Style Future?\n\nAs in Mali, JNIM has laid siege to cities in Burkina Faso, most notably Sollé and Djibo. In May 2025, the group launched a devastating attack on Djibo; sources told Crisis Group that the jihadists killed more than a hundred civilians, soldiers, and paramilitary members, and kidnapped dozens more.\n\nThe situation around the capital has grown so severe that Will Brown, a senior policy fellow for Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations, warned in the African Defense Forum Magazine that the region could soon see a Mogadishu-style scenario, with the government increasingly confined to an embattled capital.\n\nMali and Burkina Faso are the most affected, but they are not alone. In an exclusive interview with the WarFronts team, Heni Nsaibia, a senior analyst for ACLED focused on the Sahel, said the group is currently active in six countries. We concentrate on Mali and Burkina Faso because of the scale of the threat there, and because if JNIM were to form a caliphate, it would most likely begin in one of these two places.\n\n## Could Versus Should\n\nAs with most things in geopolitics, the answer is not a clean yes or no. Everything above suggests JNIM could, in theory, build a caliphate. Yet several regional experts doubt that this is even its goal. Brant Phillip, a Sahel-focused terrorism tracker, told the WarFronts team that JNIM is not trying to form a caliphate because it does not believe in the idea.\n\nNsaibia disagreed in part. He said that while a caliphate is among the long-term aims of JNIM and Al-Qaeda more broadly, the Sahel group has a more modest immediate objective: to create a jihadist-led proto-state through the gradual Islamization of society and the cooptation of local political structures. In some places it already does exactly this, providing rudimentary governance, justice, dispute resolution, and security.\n\nBeyond the question of intent, which could shift with circumstances, structural problems make a caliphate genuinely difficult. The first is fragmentation. ISIS at its peak held a contiguous belt from the outskirts of Aleppo to towns in eastern Iraq near the Iranian border, which let it move fighters and supplies freely and is a major reason it held the territory so long. JNIM's holdings look nothing like that. Although the group controls vast tracts, it still relies on what the Critical Threats Project calls \"support zones,\" areas free of significant enemy action where it can run logistics and administration, an indicator that the territory it effectively controls remains broken up. ACLED warns of the risk that Mali becomes a patchwork of areas under varied control, which would be a disaster.\n\n## The Manpower Problem\n\nThe second structural problem is numbers. In 2014, the CIA estimated the Islamic State fielded between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria. Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdish president Massoud Barzani, told The Independent that those estimates were far too low and that ISIS had at least 200,000 fighters. Even taking the extreme lower bound of 20,000, that is twice the roughly 10,000 fighters Nsaibia estimates for JNIM.\n\nFor perspective, when Russia deployed 50,000 troops near Sumy in northeastern Ukraine last year, analysts read the move as a mere fixing action. Ten thousand fighters is not a serious number in military terms, unless you are fighting Liechtenstein, and a force that small cannot hold vast swaths of territory for long.\n\nCompounding the shortfall is cohesion. As Phillip noted, JNIM's fighters are more loyal to their regional or factional leaders than ISIS fighters were to the caliphate. In his words: \"At its core, JNIM is technically a coalition of groups... Regional leaders have much more local authority, such as the Dicko brothers in Burkina Faso or Amadou Koufa in central Mali... JNIM is more of a network, whereas peak Islamic State was more of a monolithic proto-caliphate.\" Declare a caliphate while fighters still answer to local commanders, and infighting could collapse the whole structure before any outside pressure even arrives.\n\n## The Storm a Caliphate Would Summon\n\nEven if JNIM overcame these obstacles, there remains the question of whether it should. Declaring a caliphate would draw exactly the attention the group might prefer to avoid. West African governments understand that tolerating a jihadist state means watching their own security crumble next, and they would do almost anything to stop it.\n\nThe regional bloc ECOWAS recently announced plans to field an initial force of 2,000 troops by the end of 2026 to confront armed groups expanding across the region. A caliphate declaration would accelerate that timetable and multiply those numbers by several orders of magnitude. The African Union could intervene as well, dispatching peacekeepers, since a caliphate would threaten the entire continent.\n\nWashington would almost certainly join in, because the National Security Strategy explicitly flags Islamist terrorism as a risk. The shape of that intervention is already visible: in December 2025, President Trump ordered strikes against Islamic State militants in northwest Nigeria, firing Tomahawk missiles from a Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Guinea. The strikes hit ISIS camps in Sokoto State and killed what AFRICOM described as multiple terrorists, and the United States sent 100 military personnel to Abuja to help train Nigerian soldiers.\n\nFrance factors in too. Although French troops were expelled from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, French interests remain, especially in countries like Benin, where JNIM appears keen to expand. Paris might hesitate to send troops given intense anti-French sentiment, but it could still supply training, funding, intelligence, and equipment to regional forces, protecting its interests while avoiding accusations of neocolonialism. As for the Russians already in the area, Phillip was blunt: \"Based on the track record witnessed during their deployment in Mali for the past three years... [Russian troops] will not be enough, and it might even be counter-productive.\"\n\n## The Enemy Within: Rival Jihadists\n\nThe most dangerous threat to a JNIM caliphate may not be any government at all. Since 2019, JNIM has been locked in a brutal war with the Islamic State Sahel Province, formerly the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. What began as the \"Sahelian exception,\" in which both groups ignored their parent organizations' global rivalry and occasionally cooperated, collapsed into open warfare once ideological differences and territorial ambitions surfaced.\n\nBetween 2019 and 2021, researchers documented at least 125 clashes between the groups, killing an estimated 731 fighters. The violence escalated sharply in 2023, when more than 300 combatants died across multiple battles in the tri-state region where Burkina Faso, Niger, and Benin meet. According to Phillip, a key driver is ideology: the Islamic State views JNIM as apostates for failing to apply Islamic law to the fullest, for negotiating with regional governments, and for allying with secular militias against it.\n\nThe rivalry is fueled by defections as well. In early February, Phillip reported that Sadou Samahouna, a senior JNIM commander responsible for Eastern Burkina Faso, had defected to the Islamic State Sahel Province with several of his men, citing JNIM's failure to apply sharia in its totality and its peace deals with Benin and Ivory Coast. The defection was doubly significant: Samahouna is the younger brother of Abu Hanifa, JNIM's emir for Niger, and ACLED noted that a defection at that level likely raised fears within JNIM about internal cohesion. Days later, Phillip reported that a deal between the village of Boni, in northern Mali, and JNIM had collapsed, letting the Russia Africa Corps resume operations, and that a number of JNIM fighters had chosen to defect and join the Russians.\n\nPhillip cautioned that while defections are a serious problem, they are not yet existential, because JNIM recruits far more fighters than it loses, though mass defections of leaders with their men would change that calculus. The graver danger is that a caliphate declaration would hand the Islamic State Sahel Province a target. The Islamic State's central leadership has been pressing its Sahel affiliate to expand and prove its ideological superiority over JNIM, and the symbolic value of destroying an Al-Qaeda-affiliated caliphate would be immense for its propaganda. Other groups, including the Islamic State West Africa Province and Boko Haram, could pile in too, viewing a JNIM caliphate as both a challenge and an opportunity.\n\n## A Yes, With Heavy Caveats\n\nSo, could JNIM establish some form of caliphate in West Africa? The worrying answer appears to be yes, but it is a yes wrapped in enormous caveats, ranging from whether the group could sustain such a state against vast external pressure to whether it would even want to run the risk in the first place.\n\nEven without a formal caliphate, JNIM remains the most formidable jihadist threat in West Africa. Local governments will need to find solutions, and find them fast, before the group grows too powerful to contain.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What is JNIM and how did it form?\n\nJama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin is an Al-Qaeda-linked Salafi jihadist group formed in 2017 when four Mali-based extremist groups merged with the Sahara Emirate subgroup of Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb and swore allegiance to Al-Qaeda's leadership. It is now the most dominant jihadist group in the Sahel, active in six countries, with Mali and Burkina Faso the most severely affected.\n\n### How does JNIM fund its operations?\n\nThe group draws on ransoms, taxation of territory it controls, and cattle rustling. It received about $50 million plus $20 million in arms from the UAE in a recent hostage release, and around $40 million in a 2020 ransom. In one Malian district alone it earned $770,000 from cattle rustling in a single year. This wealth allows it to pay fighters wages far exceeding the region's average monthly salary of $110 to $150.\n\n### What are the main structural barriers to JNIM declaring a caliphate?\n\nThree obstacles stand out. First, JNIM's territory is fragmented rather than contiguous, relying on what analysts call \"support zones\" rather than a solid belt of controlled land like the ISIS caliphate held. Second, it fields only around 10,000 fighters — roughly half the lowest CIA estimate for ISIS at its peak. Third, commanders answer to regional or factional leaders like Amadou Koufa or the Dicko brothers, not a central authority, meaning a caliphate declaration could trigger the infighting that collapses it from within.\n\n### Why has violence risen since Russian forces replaced Western ones in the Sahel?\n\nAfter military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger expelled French and American forces, the juntas invited Russian mercenaries, now operating as the Africa Corps. Jihadist violence in Mali jumped 70 percent following the 2021 takeover, and the African Center for Strategic Studies links Malian forces and their Russian partners to 77 percent of all civilian fatalities. That brutality has fueled JNIM recruitment rather than weakening the group.\n\n### Who would respond if JNIM declared a caliphate?\n\nA declaration would almost certainly accelerate ECOWAS's planned 2,000-troop regional force and vastly expand its mandate. The African Union could deploy peacekeepers, while the United States, which already fired Tomahawk missiles at Islamic State camps in Nigeria in December 2025, would likely intervene. France could supply training, funding, and intelligence to regional forces without deploying troops. Most dangerously for JNIM, the Islamic State Sahel Province, which has been at war with JNIM since 2019, would see destroying an Al-Qaeda caliphate as an enormous propaganda prize.\n\n## Related Coverage\n\n- The rise of the Islamic State in Mozambique and the spread of jihadism across Africa\n- Russia's Africa Corps and the privatization of Sahel security\n\n## Sources\n\n1. https://adf-magazine.com/2025/11/could-jnim-eventually-control-burkina-faso/\n2. https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/africa/sahel-west-africa/321-le-jnim-et-le-dilemme-de-lexpansion-au-dela-du-sahel\n3. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/6/is-mali-about-to-fall-to-al-qaeda-affiliate-jnim\n4. https://www.dni.gov/nctc/terrorist_groups/jnim.html\n5. https://humanglemedia.com/jihadists-rivalry-in-the-sahel-is-good-news-for-counterinsurgency-efforts/\n6. https://x.com/BrantPhilip_/status/2024413086950531220?s=20\n7. https://acleddata.com/update/africa-overview-march-2026\n8. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/2/west-african-regional-army-why-thousands-of-soldiers-are-deploying\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/jnim-caliphate-west-africa.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/jnim-caliphate-west-africa datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/DDbHSGhGTDI/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: e19392573c418f29fbbd01576c5c68e0f66002399b0356c6f2fa783679b55550 tokens: 5468 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/jnim-caliphate-west-africa.md.summary.md --- The director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has described them as the most formidable extremist group in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the numbers bear out the assessment. In Mali alone, where the group was formed in 2017, they are responsible for a 300 percent spike in violent attacks and a humanitarian crisis that has left almost 500,000 people displaced, 1.8 million facing food insecurity, and 5.1 million in need of humanitarian assistance. And that is just one country. In Burkina Faso, the group has committed multiple atrocities, including in Barsalogho, where they killed over 200 civilians in the worst massacre in the nation's history. In Nigeria, they attacked Kwara State earlier this year, killing a soldier and seizing ammunition and money. In northern Benin, near the border with Niger, they recently overran a base, killing 15 soldiers. This is Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, an Al-Qaeda-linked Salafi jihadist group that formed after four Mali-based extremist groups merged with the Sahara Emirate subgroup of Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb and swore allegiance to Al-Qaeda's leadership. Since then, the group's ascent has been so rapid that the International Crisis Group, in a February report, named it the most dominant jihadist group in the Sahel. The central question this article confronts is whether JNIM could go further still and declare a caliphate of its own in West Africa. ## Key Takeaways - JNIM, an Al-Qaeda-linked Salafi jihadist group formed in 2017 from the merger of four Mali-based factions and an AQIM subgroup, is now the most dominant jihadist force in the Sahel. - JNIM is awash in cash, having received roughly $50 million plus $20 million in arms from the UAE in a recent hostage release, on top of ransoms, taxation, and cattle rustling worth millions. - By late 2025 JNIM controlled more territory than at any point in its insurgency, besieging Bamako and holding ground in 11 of Burkina Faso's 13 regions outside the capital. - Structural barriers — fragmented territory, only about 10,000 fighters, and commanders loyal to local rather than central leadership — make a true caliphate hard to build and harder to hold. - Even the possibility of a caliphate would invite intervention from ECOWAS, the African Union, the United States, France, and rival jihadist groups including the Islamic State Sahel Province. ## Building a Caliphate Before asking whether JNIM could declare a caliphate, it is worth establishing what doing so actually requires, because while the idea is popular among jihadists, only one group has pulled it off in the modern era. A caliphate, which experts define as an Islamic state of the Muslim faithful, demands far more than battlefield success. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second general emir of Al-Qaeda, laid out four conditions that had to be met before a caliphate could be declared in the Middle East: first, expelling foreign forces from controlled territory; second, establishing, supporting, and developing an Islamic authority; third, extending the jihad to neighboring secular countries; and finally, fighting Israel. ISIS succeeded where others failed because it executed the first two steps remarkably well. By 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered his speech from Mosul's al-Nuri Mosque announcing the caliphate's formation, ISIS controlled enough territory to make the claim credible, even if most Muslim scholars rejected it. Then it built the structures: enforcing sharia law, managing an annual budget of about $2 billion, and commanding more than 30,000 fighters at its peak. ## The ISIS Blueprint ISIS did not merely seize ground; it institutionalized control. The group required that factions seeking to join nominate a governor, establish a Shura Council for religious leadership, and formulate a military strategy to consolidate territory it could actually hold. That insistence on governance and command structure is part of what made the caliphate cohere. It also benefited from timing. The Syrian civil war and Iraqi sectarian tensions created power vacuums that ISIS exploited ruthlessly, opening contiguous space for a state to take shape. At its height that state covered more than 100,000 square kilometers, stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq, an unbroken belt of territory that allowed fighters, resources, and supplies to move freely. This is the benchmark against which JNIM must be measured. The comparison is instructive precisely because the two groups, despite both being formidable, look so different on the ground. To understand whether JNIM could replicate the feat, we need to weigh what it has going for it against what it lacks. ## Money, and a Lot of It The first advantage JNIM enjoys is wealth. The group recently received $50 million from the United Arab Emirates to release several hostages, one of whom was a member of the Emirati royal family. According to BBC Monitoring, the exchange also delivered an additional $20 million worth of arms and ammunition. This was not the first such windfall: in 2020, JNIM secured around $40 million in ransom for one French and two Italian hostages. Kidnapping is only one revenue stream. The group supplements it with taxes imposed on anything passing through its territory and with cattle rustling. Research by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found that in a single year, in just one district of Mali, JNIM made $770,000 from cattle rustling, suggesting the group earns millions across its territory from theft alone. That money matters enormously. In a region where the average monthly salary ranges from $110 in Mali to $150 in Burkina Faso, JNIM can offer recruits wages that dwarf legitimate employment. It also arms them cheaply. While precise small-arms costs in the Sahel are hard to pin down, the region's arms markets run at a fraction of Western prices, especially when weapons flow from looted government stockpiles or cross porous borders from Libya and other conflict zones. ## Coups, Russians, and a Security Vacuum JNIM's second great advantage is political chaos. When military juntas seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, they expelled Western forces and replaced them with Russian mercenaries, whose record against the jihadists has been, in a word, unsuccessful. Terror attacks have risen significantly since Moscow became the region's main security guarantor. According to Atrocities Watch, a non-partisan civil society organization, violent events by jihadist groups in Mali jumped 70 percent since the May 2021 military takeover, and civilian fatalities in the first quarter of 2022 exceeded any previous calendar year. An Associated Press investigation found the Russians to be as brutal as the jihadists, if not more so. Dozens of people who fled Mali accused the Africa Corps, which replaced the Wagner Group, of heinous abuses. A Malian village chief who fled to Mauritania told the AP: "It's a scorched-earth policy. The soldiers speak to no one. Anyone they see, they shoot. No questions, no warning. People don't even know why they are being killed." The African Center for Strategic Studies links Malian security forces and their Russian partners to 77 percent of all civilian fatalities, which has driven JNIM recruitment while eroding public trust in the military. Bamako appears to have grasped that the Russian partnership is not working. It is now negotiating a deal with Washington that would let American aircraft and drones resume flying over Malian airspace to gather intelligence on jihadist groups, though whether that happens in time to halt further territorial losses is anyone's guess. ## Territory: From the North to the Capital The third pillar is land. Dr. Daniel Ezienga, a research fellow at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, told Responsible Statecraft in October 2025 that JNIM controlled more territory than at any other point in its 13-year insurgency. The group has methodically pushed beyond its traditional strongholds in the north and center, and its ambitions now reach the capital itself. JNIM initiated a siege on Bamako that brought the city to its knees, controlling the roads leading in and blocking fuel tankers from neighboring countries. The group destroyed hundreds of fuel tankers, creating acute shortages that spiked fuel prices by more than 400 percent, forcing schools and businesses to close while power cuts became routine. By late January, The Africa Report noted that the siege had eased, but residents were unsure how long the calm would last. In Burkina Faso, the picture is grimmer still. According to Al Jazeera, the country has rapidly become a JNIM hotspot, with the group operating in or holding territory across 11 of 13 regions outside the capital, Ouagadougou. Between January and April 2025, JNIM attacks produced 512 reported casualties, and because those are only the reported figures from a four-month window, the true toll is undoubtedly higher. ## A Mogadishu-Style Future? As in Mali, JNIM has laid siege to cities in Burkina Faso, most notably Sollé and Djibo. In May 2025, the group launched a devastating attack on Djibo; sources told Crisis Group that the jihadists killed more than a hundred civilians, soldiers, and paramilitary members, and kidnapped dozens more. The situation around the capital has grown so severe that Will Brown, a senior policy fellow for Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations, warned in the African Defense Forum Magazine that the region could soon see a Mogadishu-style scenario, with the government increasingly confined to an embattled capital. Mali and Burkina Faso are the most affected, but they are not alone. In an exclusive interview with the WarFronts team, Heni Nsaibia, a senior analyst for ACLED focused on the Sahel, said the group is currently active in six countries. We concentrate on Mali and Burkina Faso because of the scale of the threat there, and because if JNIM were to form a caliphate, it would most likely begin in one of these two places. ## Could Versus Should As with most things in geopolitics, the answer is not a clean yes or no. Everything above suggests JNIM could, in theory, build a caliphate. Yet several regional experts doubt that this is even its goal. Brant Phillip, a Sahel-focused terrorism tracker, told the WarFronts team that JNIM is not trying to form a caliphate because it does not believe in the idea. Nsaibia disagreed in part. He said that while a caliphate is among the long-term aims of JNIM and Al-Qaeda more broadly, the Sahel group has a more modest immediate objective: to create a jihadist-led proto-state through the gradual Islamization of society and the cooptation of local political structures. In some places it already does exactly this, providing rudimentary governance, justice, dispute resolution, and security. Beyond the question of intent, which could shift with circumstances, structural problems make a caliphate genuinely difficult. The first is fragmentation. ISIS at its peak held a contiguous belt from the outskirts of Aleppo to towns in eastern Iraq near the Iranian border, which let it move fighters and supplies freely and is a major reason it held the territory so long. JNIM's holdings look nothing like that. Although the group controls vast tracts, it still relies on what the Critical Threats Project calls "support zones," areas free of significant enemy action where it can run logistics and administration, an indicator that the territory it effectively controls remains broken up. ACLED warns of the risk that Mali becomes a patchwork of areas under varied control, which would be a disaster. ## The Manpower Problem The second structural problem is numbers. In 2014, the CIA estimated the Islamic State fielded between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria. Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdish president Massoud Barzani, told The Independent that those estimates were far too low and that ISIS had at least 200,000 fighters. Even taking the extreme lower bound of 20,000, that is twice the roughly 10,000 fighters Nsaibia estimates for JNIM. For perspective, when Russia deployed 50,000 troops near Sumy in northeastern Ukraine last year, analysts read the move as a mere fixing action. Ten thousand fighters is not a serious number in military terms, unless you are fighting Liechtenstein, and a force that small cannot hold vast swaths of territory for long. Compounding the shortfall is cohesion. As Phillip noted, JNIM's fighters are more loyal to their regional or factional leaders than ISIS fighters were to the caliphate. In his words: "At its core, JNIM is technically a coalition of groups... Regional leaders have much more local authority, such as the Dicko brothers in Burkina Faso or Amadou Koufa in central Mali... JNIM is more of a network, whereas peak Islamic State was more of a monolithic proto-caliphate." Declare a caliphate while fighters still answer to local commanders, and infighting could collapse the whole structure before any outside pressure even arrives. ## The Storm a Caliphate Would Summon Even if JNIM overcame these obstacles, there remains the question of whether it should. Declaring a caliphate would draw exactly the attention the group might prefer to avoid. West African governments understand that tolerating a jihadist state means watching their own security crumble next, and they would do almost anything to stop it. The regional bloc ECOWAS recently announced plans to field an initial force of 2,000 troops by the end of 2026 to confront armed groups expanding across the region. A caliphate declaration would accelerate that timetable and multiply those numbers by several orders of magnitude. The African Union could intervene as well, dispatching peacekeepers, since a caliphate would threaten the entire continent. Washington would almost certainly join in, because the National Security Strategy explicitly flags Islamist terrorism as a risk. The shape of that intervention is already visible: in December 2025, President Trump ordered strikes against Islamic State militants in northwest Nigeria, firing Tomahawk missiles from a Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Guinea. The strikes hit ISIS camps in Sokoto State and killed what AFRICOM described as multiple terrorists, and the United States sent 100 military personnel to Abuja to help train Nigerian soldiers. France factors in too. Although French troops were expelled from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, French interests remain, especially in countries like Benin, where JNIM appears keen to expand. Paris might hesitate to send troops given intense anti-French sentiment, but it could still supply training, funding, intelligence, and equipment to regional forces, protecting its interests while avoiding accusations of neocolonialism. As for the Russians already in the area, Phillip was blunt: "Based on the track record witnessed during their deployment in Mali for the past three years... [Russian troops] will not be enough, and it might even be counter-productive." ## The Enemy Within: Rival Jihadists The most dangerous threat to a JNIM caliphate may not be any government at all. Since 2019, JNIM has been locked in a brutal war with the Islamic State Sahel Province, formerly the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. What began as the "Sahelian exception," in which both groups ignored their parent organizations' global rivalry and occasionally cooperated, collapsed into open warfare once ideological differences and territorial ambitions surfaced. Between 2019 and 2021, researchers documented at least 125 clashes between the groups, killing an estimated 731 fighters. The violence escalated sharply in 2023, when more than 300 combatants died across multiple battles in the tri-state region where Burkina Faso, Niger, and Benin meet. According to Phillip, a key driver is ideology: the Islamic State views JNIM as apostates for failing to apply Islamic law to the fullest, for negotiating with regional governments, and for allying with secular militias against it. The rivalry is fueled by defections as well. In early February, Phillip reported that Sadou Samahouna, a senior JNIM commander responsible for Eastern Burkina Faso, had defected to the Islamic State Sahel Province with several of his men, citing JNIM's failure to apply sharia in its totality and its peace deals with Benin and Ivory Coast. The defection was doubly significant: Samahouna is the younger brother of Abu Hanifa, JNIM's emir for Niger, and ACLED noted that a defection at that level likely raised fears within JNIM about internal cohesion. Days later, Phillip reported that a deal between the village of Boni, in northern Mali, and JNIM had collapsed, letting the Russia Africa Corps resume operations, and that a number of JNIM fighters had chosen to defect and join the Russians. Phillip cautioned that while defections are a serious problem, they are not yet existential, because JNIM recruits far more fighters than it loses, though mass defections of leaders with their men would change that calculus. The graver danger is that a caliphate declaration would hand the Islamic State Sahel Province a target. The Islamic State's central leadership has been pressing its Sahel affiliate to expand and prove its ideological superiority over JNIM, and the symbolic value of destroying an Al-Qaeda-affiliated caliphate would be immense for its propaganda. Other groups, including the Islamic State West Africa Province and Boko Haram, could pile in too, viewing a JNIM caliphate as both a challenge and an opportunity. ## A Yes, With Heavy Caveats So, could JNIM establish some form of caliphate in West Africa? The worrying answer appears to be yes, but it is a yes wrapped in enormous caveats, ranging from whether the group could sustain such a state against vast external pressure to whether it would even want to run the risk in the first place. Even without a formal caliphate, JNIM remains the most formidable jihadist threat in West Africa. Local governments will need to find solutions, and find them fast, before the group grows too powerful to contain. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is JNIM and how did it form? Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin is an Al-Qaeda-linked Salafi jihadist group formed in 2017 when four Mali-based extremist groups merged with the Sahara Emirate subgroup of Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb and swore allegiance to Al-Qaeda's leadership. It is now the most dominant jihadist group in the Sahel, active in six countries, with Mali and Burkina Faso the most severely affected. ### How does JNIM fund its operations? The group draws on ransoms, taxation of territory it controls, and cattle rustling. It received about $50 million plus $20 million in arms from the UAE in a recent hostage release, and around $40 million in a 2020 ransom. In one Malian district alone it earned $770,000 from cattle rustling in a single year. This wealth allows it to pay fighters wages far exceeding the region's average monthly salary of $110 to $150. ### What are the main structural barriers to JNIM declaring a caliphate? Three obstacles stand out. First, JNIM's territory is fragmented rather than contiguous, relying on what analysts call "support zones" rather than a solid belt of controlled land like the ISIS caliphate held. Second, it fields only around 10,000 fighters — roughly half the lowest CIA estimate for ISIS at its peak. Third, commanders answer to regional or factional leaders like Amadou Koufa or the Dicko brothers, not a central authority, meaning a caliphate declaration could trigger the infighting that collapses it from within. ### Why has violence risen since Russian forces replaced Western ones in the Sahel? After military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger expelled French and American forces, the juntas invited Russian mercenaries, now operating as the Africa Corps. Jihadist violence in Mali jumped 70 percent following the 2021 takeover, and the African Center for Strategic Studies links Malian forces and their Russian partners to 77 percent of all civilian fatalities. That brutality has fueled JNIM recruitment rather than weakening the group. ### Who would respond if JNIM declared a caliphate? A declaration would almost certainly accelerate ECOWAS's planned 2,000-troop regional force and vastly expand its mandate. The African Union could deploy peacekeepers, while the United States, which already fired Tomahawk missiles at Islamic State camps in Nigeria in December 2025, would likely intervene. France could supply training, funding, and intelligence to regional forces without deploying troops. Most dangerously for JNIM, the Islamic State Sahel Province, which has been at war with JNIM since 2019, would see destroying an Al-Qaeda caliphate as an enormous propaganda prize. ## Related Coverage - The rise of the Islamic State in Mozambique and the spread of jihadism across Africa - Russia's Africa Corps and the privatization of Sahel security ## Sources 1. https://adf-magazine.com/2025/11/could-jnim-eventually-control-burkina-faso/ 2. https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/africa/sahel-west-africa/321-le-jnim-et-le-dilemme-de-lexpansion-au-dela-du-sahel 3. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/6/is-mali-about-to-fall-to-al-qaeda-affiliate-jnim 4. https://www.dni.gov/nctc/terrorist_groups/jnim.html 5. https://humanglemedia.com/jihadists-rivalry-in-the-sahel-is-good-news-for-counterinsurgency-efforts/ 6. https://x.com/BrantPhilip_/status/2024413086950531220?s=20 7. https://acleddata.com/update/africa-overview-march-2026 8. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/2/west-african-regional-army-why-thousands-of-soldiers-are-deploying <!-- youtube:DDbHSGhGTDI -->