The Sahel at War: When the Government Is Worse Than the Jihadists

Close your eyes and imagine you are caught in the crossfire of a jihadist insurgency. You are an ordinary civilian in an ordinary village, far from any big city, trying your best to care for an ordinary family. Despite very limited means and even less money, you manage to get by. But you live under constant threat, both from the bush battles that sometimes spray bullets toward your home, and from the distinct possibility that you could be swept up in an Islamist inquisition.

If suspicion falls upon you, or upon your village, the results could be dire. The jihadists will come calling, round you up alongside your countrymen, and, depending on what information they can extract, you could lose everything, including your life.

Now imagine how much worse your situation would have to be for the threat of violence from the jihadists to pale in comparison to what the government will do, if it finds you first. In the three nations of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, stretching across the arid belt of land known as the African Sahel, that constant danger is a fact of life.

Key Takeaways

In Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, military regimes that seized power in the 2020s have organized into a bloc called the Alliance of Sahel States and turned to Russia for support after breaking with France and the West.
According to Human Rights Watch and ACLED, government forces and their allies in Mali and Burkina Faso have killed more than double the number of civilians killed by the jihadists.
The principal insurgency, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), formed in 2017 from earlier jihadist groups and became, by the early 2020s, recognized as the world’s fastest-growing militant insurgency.
A 316-page Human Rights Watch report titled “None Can Run Away” found that over 1,800 civilians have been confirmed killed in Burkina Faso since 2023, with the government and allied militias responsible for more than double the killings attributed to JNIM and the Islamic State.
Government massacres include Djibo in 2023 (over 400 killed), Nondin and Soro in 2024 (at least 223, including 56 children), and Moura in 2022, where Malian forces and Wagner mercenaries killed over 500 civilians over four days.
Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore, 38, presides over a fast-growing cult of personality and told journalists in April that “people need to forget about the issue of democracy.”
With no trustworthy fighting force and the West shut out, civilians increasingly side with the jihadists, whom they perceive as the lesser of two evils.

A powerful al-Qaeda-linked insurgency roams the landscape, capturing villages, choking off energy supplies, and trying to throttle any resistance to its movement. On the periphery, an even more dangerous enemy lurks in the shadows: the Islamic State in the Sahel. But the military governments that rule those three nations may somehow be even more fearsome than the jihadists.

The numbers do not lie. According to a recent report from Human Rights Watch and the conflict-monitoring group ACLED, in Mali and Burkina Faso government forces and their allies have killed more than double the number of civilians that the jihadists have.

For the ordinary people caught in the middle, there is no way out, and every reason to believe the situation can still get worse.

A Land at War

Even compared with most conflicts across the globe, the overlapping insurgencies of the Sahel are a particularly convoluted subject. The problem is made worse by the relative scarcity of reporting coming out of the conflict zone, where independent journalists are in constant danger and major global news bureaus rarely devote resources. Like the wars playing out in Myanmar, Sudan, or the Congo, the conflict across the Sahel is a war being fought in the dark.

Before we can address the threats Sahel communities face, we have to understand the balance of power. At the center of this entire conflict are the three key nations taken over by their respective militaries in the 2020s: first Mali, then Burkina Faso, and finally Niger. Guinea, on the Malian border, was also taken over in a 2021 coup, but it is not relevant here. After each seized power, the new trio of military regimes organized into a bloc called the Alliance of Sahel States.

In all three nations, the regimes cited common grievances: the inability of civilian governments to deal with what was then a rising jihadist insurgency, the broader corruption of those governments, and resentment toward France, the United States, and other Western security backers. That resentment was driven partly by those nations’ perceived failures in helping the Sahel deal with its jihadist problem, and partly by the very long history of French colonial exploitation in this part of the world. As the three nations broke ties with the West, they left the regional bloc ECOWAS and built the Alliance of Sahel States as an alternative. Then they turned to Russia as a new sponsor, first welcoming mercenaries from the notorious Wagner Group, and then, after Wagner’s failed 2023 mutiny, accepting their replacements in a more easily controlled Russian paramilitary, the Africa Corps.

The Insurgency That Outgrew Its Enemies

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On the other side of the conflict is Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, better known as JNIM. The al-Qaeda-linked insurgency was first established in 2017 as a union of several earlier jihadist groups with connections to the ethnic Tuareg and Fulani communities, each of whom carries its own long and complicated history of resistance against Sahel governments. By the early 2020s, JNIM was recognized by global counterterrorism experts as the world’s fastest-growing militant insurgency.

Today it ranks among the most powerful non-state rebel groups on Earth, counting both jihadist and non-jihadist organizations. JNIM is working to establish a proto-state, similar to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in the mid-2010s, while spreading its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam across the landscape.

If you are only minimally familiar with this conflict, an alliance of three military regimes plus the backing of Russian mercenaries might sound like a fair match for a ragtag band of al-Qaeda adherents. But JNIM has been more than a match for its regional adversaries. The three governments have done an impressively bad job of coordinating a resistance among themselves, including through a so-called Unified Force of roughly 6,000 troops that has failed to achieve any decisive results. Soldiers from all three regimes face constant ambushes, IED attacks, and even direct assaults on their bases, often using motorcycle swarms.

Russia’s mercenaries have fared no better, suffering a couple of stunning losses in direct confrontations along with steady attrition as the jihadists target them intentionally. JNIM has paralyzed parts of Mali by blockading vital fuel imports, usually carried via tanker trucks. Worse, the group has expanded into the territory of nearby nations like Benin, Togo, and Nigeria, exploiting regional tensions to build secure operating bases and staging areas the three regimes cannot touch.

JNIM also fights frequent battles against the Islamic State in the Sahel, an even more extreme and violent group that has exploited the region’s chaos to become one of the most powerful Islamic State franchises anywhere on Earth. After multiple years of collaboration between the Alliance of Sahel States and Russia, the result is obvious: however insufficient the prior civilian governments or their Western sponsors may have been, the current status quo is definitely worse.

The Strongmen and Their Crisis of Legitimacy

For the leaders of the three military regimes, the failure to deliver security is a major problem, because their political power and legitimacy rest on their ability to do what civilian governments could not. The most famous of the trio is Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso, just 38 years old and 34 when he took power. Traore presides over a fast-growing cult of personality that portrays him as a proud pan-Africanist hell-bent on breaking the chains of neocolonialism that have kept Burkina Faso disenfranchised.

He is popular across the continent, adept at social media messaging, and talks a very big talk, claiming to have made Burkina Faso totally food self-sufficient by the end of 2025 and to be restructuring its economy. He is also becoming increasingly direct about his intentions, telling journalists this April that “people need to forget about the issue of democracy.”

Mali’s leader, Assimi Goita, and Niger’s leader, Abdourahamane Tchiani, keep a lower profile, but both take a similar approach to Traore in broad strokes. Each is trying to find a delicate balance, and they all know it: depending on exactly how they fail, their failures could spark pro-democracy protests, a palace coup, or an attempt by the military to install a new regime in their place.

As of early 2026, all three regimes appear to be failing in an even more dangerous way. Across their nations, and especially in the countryside, the regimes have failed to improve the daily lives of ordinary people. Poverty is widespread, inequality and unemployment are high, and the prospects for change, individually or collectively, are minimal.

In any part of the world, those problems would tend to drive disenfranchised people away from their governments. But in this part of the world, where jihadist and Islamic fundamentalist ideologies are already prevalent, those persistent socioeconomic conditions and government failures hand a movement like JNIM a perfect recruiting environment. The only thing that could make ordinary people even more likely to sympathize with the jihadists would be if the Sahel’s military governments also carried out regular abuses against them.

”None Can Run Away”

They do. The militaries of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have never been renowned for the fair treatment of civilians, but the problem has spiraled fully out of control since their respective regimes took over. Soldiers are known to carry out regular extrajudicial killings, including large-scale massacres where dozens or even hundreds of people are killed.

Ordinary people are frequently disappeared by state forces, often alongside journalists and rights activists, and survivors report the institutionalized use of torture. Burkina Faso in particular has developed a habit of forcibly conscripting journalists and political opponents to serve on the front lines. In all three nations, militaries leverage gender-based violence too brutal to describe in detail.

Violence is often targeted at ethnic minority groups, who endure some of the most horrific treatment imaginable. The presence of Russian mercenaries, through either the Wagner Group or the Africa Corps, has only made matters worse, with those mercenaries often providing direct instruction on how state forces can leverage crimes against humanity to maximum effect.

As bad as the situation was believed to be, a recent Human Rights Watch report revealed that the true scale of the problem is even worse. The 316-page report, carrying the tagline “None Can Run Away,” focuses primarily on Burkina Faso. Since 2023, it finds, over 1,800 civilians have been confirmed killed in Burkina Faso during the ongoing insurgency, along with tens of thousands displaced.

But according to Human Rights Watch, Burkina Faso’s government and its allies in local militias are responsible for more than double the number of civilian killings perpetrated by JNIM and the Islamic State. The report explicitly calls out Burkina Faso’s “horrific abuses” and accuses the government of the ethnic cleansing of civilians from the Fulani minority. As the executive director of Human Rights Watch put it: “The scale of atrocities taking place in Burkina Faso is mind-boggling, as is the lack of global attention to this crisis.”

A Contradiction That Resists Logic

At the heart of the ongoing Sahel conflict lies a contradiction that would seem to resist logic itself. This is a war where, on one side, we find an extraordinarily powerful jihadist insurgency in JNIM, along with one of the most fearsome regional franchises of the Islamic State. Undeniably, those are the bad guys. The Human Rights Watch report emphasizes it, years of excellent expert reporting on the Sahel emphasize it, and for posterity it bears repeating.

But it says something profound about a conflict when a group like JNIM, or literal ISIS, are somehow not the worst actors on the field. By the numbers, they simply are not.

As damning as the report is for Burkina Faso, it aligns with the vast majority of non-partisan, responsible reporting on the crisis, in which Burkinabe forces have been implicated in incredible acts of violence against their own people. There is reason to believe the death toll is seriously underreported. Much of the violence happens in remote areas where documentation and outside observers are scarce, and where people are often unwilling to speak to outsiders even when they do pass through. And as the report emphasizes, the Burkinabe government is making an active, consistent effort to hide its own abuses.

Nor is this problem unique to Burkina Faso. The governments of Mali and Niger employ a very similar tactical and strategic approach, involving regular human rights abuses, repression, and cleansing of the civilian population when convenient.

The Geography of Massacre

Consider the massacres. Two of the largest government-perpetrated atrocities in Burkina Faso’s recent memory were the 2023 killings in the town of Djibo, where over 400 civilians were killed, and the 2024 killings in the villages of Nondin and Soro, where at least 223 more civilians, including 56 children, were slaughtered. Both pale in comparison to the 2022 massacre carried out by Malian forces alongside Wagner Group mercenaries in the town of Moura, where over 500 civilians were wiped out over the span of four days. And, again, JNIM shares the blame; the group has claimed massacres of hundreds of civilians at a time on several occasions.

Yet the differences in JNIM’s conduct compared with government forces have made the jihadists, and even the Islamic State, effective recruiters who can often rely on local support in the rural areas hit hardest by the fighting. This is a conflict where there simply is no fighting force that can be trusted not to massacre civilians, and when communities are forced to choose a side to secure a degree of protection, they often choose the jihadists. Regime forces disappear people more indiscriminately.

They often kill without even attempting to find out who does and does not support the jihadists, and somehow they achieve an even worse level of violence than the insurgents do. The regimes focus their violence on impoverished minority communities, whereas the jihadists at least claim, however dubiously, to be protecting those communities.

JNIM exploits longstanding social grievances. It protects small communities from bandits, raiders, and rival ethnic militias, organizes Islamic courts to resolve local disputes, and offers a path to relative prosperity through joining the insurgency. When government forces arrive, their presence means death, often accompanied by the cackling and cheering of white Russians who seem to take immense pleasure in the suffering of ordinary people. And the numbers do not lie: government forces and jihadists are both killing civilians, but the available data indicates that government forces kill at over double the rate of the jihadists.

No Path Out

These communities have no real opportunity to seek a different path forward. The areas at highest risk are also the poorest, with the most limited access to weapons, which they can generally obtain only through trafficking networks and black markets controlled by the jihadists. Peaceful protest and nonviolent resistance are non-starters in a part of the world where both soldiers and insurgents will happily gun down anybody who gets in their way, without bothering to find out what their victims stood for. Inside the three military regimes, dissent is tightly controlled and ruthlessness is rewarded, meaning more moderate internal factions are both at risk of being purged and highly unlikely to be sent to the front-line areas where they could make a difference.

Governments across the Western world lack the means to intervene, given the three juntas’ staunch opposition to what they call neocolonialist influences. The sole exception is the United States, where Washington is looking to restart security cooperation with Mali. But judging by Washington’s handling of underreported conflicts in the Congo, Nigeria, Haiti, and elsewhere, the current US administration is not particularly interested in taking a strong stance against atrocities in war zones.

For the people caught in the middle of the Sahel conflict, there are no good guys, no morally grey guys, and not even any typical bad guys. There are exceptionally bad guys, willing to carry out mass attacks against civilians at their leisure, and there are somehow even worse guys, willing to do the same while leveraging foreign backers and the institutions of state power to do it. Civilians have no meaningful collective self-protection force, and no outside power with both the resources and the motivation to make a difference. They are at the mercy of fighting forces operating with total impunity, while the African Union, ECOWAS, the United Nations, and every powerful nation on Earth has chosen to stand aside.

The executive director of Human Rights Watch put it best, speaking about Burkina Faso with a message that should carry weight across the Sahel: “The world needs to recognize the magnitude of the atrocities unfolding in Burkina Faso to bring them to an end.” He is right. That does need to happen. But all available evidence suggests it is not going to, and certainly not anytime soon.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which three nations are at the center of the Sahel conflict, and what unites their governments?

Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger were each taken over by their military during the 2020s. After seizing power, the three regimes organized into a bloc called the Alliance of Sahel States, cited shared grievances over failed civilian governments and Western security backers, left ECOWAS, and turned to Russia as a new sponsor, first welcoming Wagner Group mercenaries and then their replacement, the Africa Corps.

What is JNIM, and why has it been so effective?

Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin is an al-Qaeda-linked insurgency established in 2017 as a union of earlier jihadist groups tied to the Tuareg and Fulani communities. By the early 2020s it was recognized as the world’s fastest-growing militant insurgency and is now among the most powerful non-state rebel groups on Earth. JNIM has paralyzed parts of Mali by blockading fuel imports, subjected all three regimes to constant ambushes and IED attacks, and has expanded into neighboring countries including Benin, Togo, and Nigeria.

Who is killing more civilians — the governments or the jihadists?

According to Human Rights Watch and the conflict-monitoring group ACLED, in Mali and Burkina Faso, government forces and their allies have killed more than double the number of civilians killed by the jihadists. The 316-page Human Rights Watch report “None Can Run Away” found that over 1,800 civilians have been confirmed killed in Burkina Faso since 2023, blames the government and allied militias for more than double the killings attributed to JNIM and the Islamic State, and accuses the government of the ethnic cleansing of Fulani civilians.

What are the largest documented massacres in the conflict?

Two of the largest government-perpetrated atrocities in Burkina Faso’s recent history were the 2023 killings in Djibo, where over 400 civilians were killed, and the 2024 killings in the villages of Nondin and Soro, where at least 223 civilians including 56 children were slaughtered. In Mali, forces alongside Wagner Group mercenaries killed over 500 civilians over four days in the 2022 Moura massacre. JNIM has also claimed massacres of hundreds of civilians on several occasions.

Why do some civilians side with the jihadists despite their violence?

Communities are forced to choose a side to secure some degree of protection, and government forces are often perceived as the greater threat: they disappear and kill people indiscriminately, target impoverished minority communities, and kill at over double the rate of the jihadists according to available data. JNIM, by contrast, claims to protect those communities from bandits and rival militias, organizes Islamic courts to resolve local disputes, and offers a path to relative prosperity by joining the insurgency.