Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger tore up the old security order, expelled French troops and left ECOWAS. The jihadist war they were fighting has only grown.
Published 14 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
There is a strip of land south of the Sahara, running from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, where the map of the world is being redrawn. The Sahel, a semi-arid belt of countries that includes Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, was for a decade the centrepiece of Western counterterrorism in Africa. Thousands of French troops, an American drone base, a United Nations peacekeeping mission and billions of dollars in aid were all committed to holding back a jihadist insurgency. Then, in three years, the governments that hosted that effort were overthrown by their own soldiers, the French were expelled, the UN mission was told to leave, and the three countries walked out of ECOWAS, the West African bloc they had belonged to for half a century.
The coups came in quick succession: Mali in 2020, and again in 2021, when the military consolidated power; Burkina Faso twice in 2022; Niger in July 2023, when soldiers detained the elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, and installed General Abdourahamane Tiani. Each coup had its own causes, but the public justification was the same: the elected governments had failed to stop the jihadist war, and the foreign partnerships, above all with France, had failed with them. The juntas promised what every junta promises, security first, sovereignty restored, dignity recovered. What they have delivered, several years on, is a security situation that by most measures has grown worse, and a political order that shows little sign of returning power to civilians.
The war they inherited is one of the cruellest and least reported of this century. The central Sahel's jihadist insurgency began in northern Mali in 2012, when a Tuareg rebellion, Islamist groups and a collapsing Libyan arsenal combined to produce a crisis that nearly took the Malian state. France intervened in 2013 and stopped the advance on Bamako, but the insurgency metastasised. Two rival jihadist ecosystems now dominate: Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), linked to Al-Qaeda, and Islamic State Sahel Province, the regional branch of the Islamic State group. They fight each other as well as the states, and they have spread from northern Mali into central Mali, across Burkina Faso, into western Niger, and toward the coastal states of Benin, Togo and Ivory Coast.
The juntas' foreign policy has been a deliberate rupture. Mali expelled French troops in 2022 and the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA in 2023. Burkina Faso expelled French forces in 2023. Niger, after the 2023 coup, expelled French troops and, in 2024, told the United States to withdraw from its drone base at Agadez, a facility that had been central to American surveillance across the region. Each expulsion was staged as an act of sovereignty, and each was popular with a public that had come to see the French presence as a humiliation that delivered no security. Whether or not that judgement is fair, it was widely shared, and it is the political capital the juntas have lived on.
In place of the French, the juntas turned to Russia. The Wagner Group, and then its successor, the Africa Corps, became the juntas' main security partner, above all in Mali, where Russian fighters have operated alongside the Malian army. Mali has acknowledged working with Russian instructors, while denying the scale reported by Western governments. The United Nations and human rights groups have documented atrocities in which Russian personnel were implicated alongside Malian forces. The Russian model, in the Sahel as elsewhere, offers what the French model did not: security assistance without lectures on democracy, human rights or governance. For juntas that have no intention of holding elections soon, that is the point.
The break with ECOWAS was the institutional expression of the same rupture. The three states formed the Alliance of Sahel States in 2023, turned it into a confederation in 2024, and formally left ECOWAS in January 2025, after the bloc imposed sanctions and threatened military intervention over the Niger coup. The withdrawal, the first of its kind in ECOWAS history, fragments a region that was already one of the poorest in the world. ECOWAS had provided free movement, a common market and a security framework. The AES offers sovereignty and solidarity. What it has not yet offered is a credible answer to the question that defeated its predecessors: how to defeat an insurgency that moves across borders the new confederation has just hardened.
The central question about the Sahel is why, after a decade of effort, the jihadist insurgency keeps growing. Part of the answer is military: the jihadists are mobile, embedded in local communities, and able to recruit from populations that the state has neglected or abused. Part is political: the insurgency feeds on grievances that are real, corrupt local officials, land disputes between farmers and herders, the marginalisation of pastoral communities, and the abuses committed by armies and militias in the name of counterterrorism. Every massacre of civilians by state forces, and the UN has documented many, is a recruiting gift to the jihadists.
Part of the answer is structural. The Sahel's states are among the weakest on earth, trying to govern vast territories with few roads, few schools and few civil servants. When the state is absent, armed groups provide a rough order: dispute resolution, protection, a tax system, a court. JNIM, in particular, has proved adept at governing the territory it controls, which is one reason it has proved so hard to dislodge. Airstrikes can kill commanders. They cannot replace a state. And the juntas, for all their sovereignty rhetoric, face the same problem their predecessors did: they do not have the troops, the money or the administrative reach to hold the territory they claim.
The regional spillover is the most dangerous part of the story. The coastal states of West Africa, Benin, Togo, Ivory Coast and Ghana, which once seemed insulated, have all reported jihadist activity in their northern border regions. The Gulf of Guinea, one of the world's busiest shipping corridors, sits at the end of that chain. The Sahel's war, in other words, is no longer a Sahel problem. It is a West African problem, and the response, or the absence of one, will shape the security of a region of more than 400 million people.
Three futures are visible for the Sahel, and none is clean. The first is that the juntas consolidate: the AES builds joint forces, the Russian partnership holds, the insurgency is contained, and the confederation becomes a durable alternative to ECOWAS. The second is that the insurgency keeps spreading, the juntas lose control of more territory, and the Sahel becomes a patchwork of jihadist emirates, army garrisons and abandoned countryside. The third is a negotiated settlement of some kind, whether with jihadist groups or within the region, that trades the sovereignty rhetoric for a workable security arrangement. Each future has its advocates, and each has failed to arrive.
Western coverage, from Reuters, the Associated Press and French outlets, frames the Sahel as a failure of counterterrorism and a victory for Russian influence: juntas that expelled democracies' troops, invited mercenaries, and made the war worse. The emphasis is on atrocities, on the Wagner succession, and on the loss of Western leverage.
Eastern coverage, from Russian state media and its partners, frames the Sahel as a liberation story: sovereign states throwing off neocolonial tutelage, choosing their own partners, and building a confederation free of French control. The Russian presence is presented as invited assistance, the juntas as legitimate expressions of popular will.
Global South coverage, from African and Arab outlets, reads the Sahel as a sovereignty crisis with deep roots: a region whose borders were drawn in Paris, whose states were built to extract, and whose people have paid for every foreign experiment. The emphasis is on the failure of ECOWAS and the African Union to offer an alternative, and on the human cost paid by Sahelians.
