The deadly al-Qaeda affiliate terrorising western Africa

Telegraph

20-07-2025

When Amadou Traoré was posted to an army base in western Mali, his family could take comfort that the soldier was far away from the jidahists pillaging towns and killing hundreds.
The Kayes region, where he was based, had escaped the relentless terrorist attacks that led the US and UN to label Mali and its neighbours the new global epicentre of terrorism.
But that reprieve from bloodshed ended this month. Lieut Traoré's family woke to reports of coordinated attacks in seven towns and cities across the region.
'Automatically, I called his wife: 'Have you heard from Amadou?' recalls his father, Ousmane. At the same time, social media began flooding with pictures of destruction unfolding in an area previously considered safe.
As his family spent hours calling the army officer's mobile, his phone rang out and later it went straight to voicemail.
'It was the next day that his wife called me to tell me that she had been contacted to say her husband had died,' the retired teacher told The Telegraph.
'And that's how we learned. We learned and in turn, I informed his mother, I informed his brothers.'
Ousmane's son was killed by the same al-Qaeda offshoot rampaging across Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. It has become one of the world's deadliest militant groups.
Some 850 people have been massacred by Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) across the three countries in May alone, according to data from Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), a US crisis-monitoring group.
The surge in attacks has marked one of the deadliest periods in the Sahel's recent history and heightened fears about the stability of the region at a time when its junta regimes are estranged from former Western military allies.
After more than a decade of insurgency bloodshed which has caused mass displacement, there are fears the violence is now pushing toward coastal west Africa.
Gen Michael Langley, the top US commander in Africa, said reaching the coast was one of the terrorists' new objectives.
'If they secure access to the coastline, they can finance their operations through smuggling, human trafficking, and arms trading,' he said.
Mali's government was able to repel JNIMs' attacks on July 1, but the push into the Kayes region has been described by analysts as a key change in the war.
At the same time, there has been an apparent shift from rural guerrilla tactics to a campaign aimed at controlling territory around urban centres and asserting political dominance in the Sahel, they said.
South-west Mali not only controls access to the nearby Senegal and Mauritania borders, but also contains much of Mali's gold wealth.
Ulf Laessing, director of the Sahel programme at German think tank the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, said Mali still had a better grip on its south-west than elsewhere, but the new JNIM push could stretch government forces.
'JNIM is trying to establish a presence in south-western Mali near the Senegal border, which has been relatively quiet,' Mr Laessing told The Telegraph.
'The region is strategically important as Mali's main supply route for imports from Dakar passes through Kayes and western Mali.
'I think JNIM is trying to establish a new front, and force the army to move soldiers from the north and centre to the south.'
Mali has been in deep crisis since early last decade, when Tuareg separatists and radical Islamist factions took over Timbuktu, Gao and other towns across the north.
French military intervention had some early success pushing them back, but Paris soon became bogged down in a difficult counter-insurgency mission marred by strained ties with the government.
The violence spread into Niger and Burkina Faso and in 2017 JNIM was founded in a merger of jihadist groups including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
JNIM and its estimated 6,000 to 7,000 fighters has since been the region's strongest militant group and is led by Iyad Ag Ghaly.
Ghaly, the former rebel leader in Mali's Tuareg uprisings in the 1990s, led Ansar Dine, the fundamentalist group, as part of a coalition that briefly occupied northern Mali in 2012.
His ambition is thought to be to impose Islamic rule across the Sahel.
Military coups in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have all capitalised on public anger at the failure to improve security in the face of JNIM's advance.
Yet while the incoming juntas have kicked out Western allies, particularly the former colonial power France, and turned to the Kremlin for military support instead, the violence continues to worsen.
The juntas and Russian mercenaries are meanwhile accused of turning people against them by conducting atrocities as they try to beat back JNIM's advance.
Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, of the International Crisis Group, said: 'The parties are fighting a war of attrition, with jihadist groups expanding in rural areas, and government forces and their Russian allies controlling urban centres.'
Meanwhile, JNIM's battlefield tactics are reported to have become increasingly sophisticated, and now include the use of anti-aircraft weapons and drones.
The group is also thought to gain hefty revenue from raids, cattle rustling, hijacking of goods, kidnappings and taxes on local communities.
It has imposed taxes in areas it controls and imposed a form of Sharia law, requiring women to wear veils and men to grow beards.
Mr Traore said that the JNIM attacks that had killed his son showed how powerful the group had become. He predicted only some form of negotiation would be able to stop the violence.
He said: 'It will take time and in my opinion, it's negotiations, it's dialogue that we must consider.
'Because we're fed up with this war all the time. Attacks here and there, killings here and there and deaths. Really, we've had enough. We've had enough.'