Two interlocking dynamics are driving the Sahel toward a more dangerous equilibrium. On the ground, the al Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen, JNIM, has moved from hit and run attacks to large scale battlefield victories that have eroded the Burkinabè army’s credibility. Strategic weakness at the center has been compounded by political rupture with former partners and an international response that so far has failed to close the governance gap JNIM exploits.
The operational picture is stark. JNIM’s June 2024 assault in Mansila, where the group claimed the killing of over a hundred soldiers and the capture of an army post, was not an isolated event. It was one in a series of ambushes and base seizures that have inflicted heavy military losses and bolstered jihadist control of territory along porous borders. These battlefield reversals have real political consequences. Units demoralize, recruitment to irregular militias rises, and local populations are forced to choose between predatory armed groups and an absent state.
The weight of the trend is visible in regional data. The Sahel accounted for a disproportionately large share of terrorism related deaths in 2024, underscoring that what was once a localized insurgency has assumed regional scale. Burkina Faso remains among the worst affected states, even as absolute numbers fluctuate year to year. That statistical reality matters because it compresses risk: refugees, fighters, illicit trade, and weapons flow across borders with few effective checks.
Political choices since the 2022 and 2023 coups have accelerated these dynamics. The Traoré-led junta moved quickly to expel French forces and to rebalance security partnerships toward Russian actors. Those decisions have reduced some forms of external support, while creating new dependencies and mixed results in combat effectiveness. The international gap has not been meaningfully filled by either unilateral deployments or ad hoc private security arrangements. Meanwhile regional architecture meant to coordinate responses has frayed. The formal withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger from ECOWAS in late January 2025 deepens that institutional fracture and diminishes a forum that could still provide political leverage, conflict mediation, and cooperative security measures.
Equally consequential are the methods of state survival being deployed at scale. The expansion of volunteer militias known as Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland, VDP, and heavy handed counterinsurgency operations have produced documented abuses. Those abuses feed the very insurgent recruitment networks the government claims to be fighting. Brutal cycles of reprisal have a force multiplier effect for JNIM because they erode local trust and create permissive environments for radicalization. Human rights failures therefore are not merely moral failures. They are strategic liabilities.
Taken together, these trends create plausible trajectories in which parts of Burkina Faso become de facto governed by nonstate Islamist authorities. That outcome would not require a conventional takeover of Ouagadougou. Instead it would be the accumulation of liberated zones, degraded state services, parallel tax and justice systems, and safe havens for transnational operatives. The regional consequences would include hardened insurgent supply lines between Mali and Burkina Faso, renewed flows of fighters into West Africa, and an expanded footprint for illicit mining and trafficking that underwrites further violence.
What should be done is clear in principle but hard in practice. First, external actors must recalibrate to avoid a binary choice between large scale troop commitments and total disengagement. Targeted support that emphasizes intelligence sharing, special operations training linked to human rights safeguards, and logistics for rapid reaction forces can blunt jihadist momentum without provoking political backlash. Second, donors and multilateral institutions must condition assistance on measurable reforms to reduce abuses by security forces and VDP units. Accountability and local reconciliation are force multipliers for stabilization. Third, economic levers matter. Curbing illicit gold flows and sanctioning the networks that profit from conflict will shrink the financial base that enables JNIM to sustain and equip itself. Fourth, regional political reintegration is urgent. Even a pared back ECOWAS that focuses on border security, refugee protection, and judicial cooperation is better than no common framework at all.
Finally, policymakers must accept hard trade offs. Quick fixes are unlikely. A strategy that reasserts state legitimacy in the Sahel will be long term, multisectoral, and intrusive in domestic politics. It must combine security help with investments in governance, services, and credible justice. Absent sustained and coherent international engagement that recognizes the political as well as the military nature of the threat, JNIM’s battlefield gains risk becoming enduring territorial control. The cost of that outcome will be paid in displaced people, regional instability, and strategic setbacks that reverberate far beyond West Africa.