Across the central Sahel, a region stretching from Mali through Burkina Faso and into Niger, years of overlapping crises have converged into one of the world’s most volatile security landscapes. Military coups, a spreading jihadist insurgency, the withdrawal of French forces, and the growing footprint of Russian-linked mercenary units have combined to erode state authority over huge stretches of territory, leaving millions of civilians caught in the middle.
The scale of the danger was underscored in late April, when fighters from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-affiliated coalition, coordinated with Tuareg separatists from the Azawad Liberation Front to launch simultaneous attacks across several Malian locations, including the capital Bamako, Kati, Gao, Mopti, and Sévaré. It was one of the most serious escalations Mali has seen in years. In the same offensive, JNIM claimed a series of attacks in the country’s south that killed several senior military officials, among them the country’s defence minister, who died in a suicide vehicle-bomb attack.
JNIM is not the only armed force reshaping the map. The Islamic State West Africa Province and its Sahel branch, active around the Lake Chad Basin and increasingly in northern Mali and Niger, operate as rivals to JNIM rather than allies, yet the two networks now collectively control more territory than at any point since Mali’s 2012 crisis. Their expansion has been aided, not slowed, by the political upheaval of the past several years.
That upheaval has been dramatic. Military juntas have seized power in Mali twice since 2020, in Burkina Faso in 2022, in Niger in 2023, and Chad has been under transitional military rule since 2021. Rather than reversing the insurgency, these governments have leaned into a harder security posture: Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have reportedly carried out coordinated air strikes against suspected militant positions, while formalizing their own defense pact, the Alliance of Sahel States, and withdrawing together from the regional bloc ECOWAS in January 2025. Alongside that shift, French troops have largely departed the region, replaced in several countries by Russian-linked Africa Corps personnel operating in a security-assistance role once filled by Western partners.
For civilians, the practical effect of all this maneuvering has been worsening, not improving, security. Assessments of the conflict point to rising jihadist territorial control and a growing frequency of attacks since the coups began, concentrated in rural central Mali, northern Burkina Faso, and the tri-border area where Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso meet. Civilian casualties, from both insurgent attacks and the military operations meant to counter them, have reportedly reached record levels, even as displacement continues to strain communities that already had little capacity to absorb it.
With juntas prioritizing military solutions, jihadist networks expanding rather than retreating, and regional and international partnerships in flux, there is little indication the situation is close to stabilizing. ACLED’s analysis of the conflict’s spread beyond the three central Sahelian states offers a closer look at how the violence has expanded and what is driving it.