Sunday’s almost-coup in Benin flickered briefly across global headlines before disappearing into the digital abyss. But it should not have. It was the latest tremor from a region collapsing in slow motion—a Sahel that is now the epicentre of one of the world’s least-covered wars, and where jihadist movements have made extraordinary gains in 2025.
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Benin’s putschists were defeated, but the forces of instability are still advancing. Benin sits exposed between two open doors. To the northwest lies Burkina Faso, where fighters of Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) move with ease across porous borders. To the northeast is the Nigerian frontier, where bandits and new jihadist factions such as the emerging Lukarawa seep into Beninese territory.
Nigeria’s swift intervention may have saved Benin from joining the growing arc of military juntas stretching from Niamey to Bamako. Had the coup succeeded, Lagos — the beating heart of West Africa’s economy — would suddenly have found itself 90 kilometres from this disorder. Benin survived. But the threat remains.
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And nowhere is the centre of gravity shifting more dramatically than in Mali, where JNIM has pulled off one of the most consequential manoeuvres of the war.
Bamako on the brink
Mali experienced one of its bloodiest periods in mid-2025 as JNIM launched coordinated offensives across the centre and north.
Starting in June, JNIM tightened a fuel blockade that has become the single most effective pressure tool against Mali’s junta. By mid-November, jihadist units were destroying roughly one third of all fuel tankers entering the country, plunging the economy into an emergency. Mali’s roads — from the Ivorian border, from Senegal, from Mauritania — became sites of constant ambush.
The blockade revealed the bankruptcy of Mali’s Russian alliance. Russian “operations” increasingly resembled massacres, not counterinsurgency — deepening civilian hostility.
Meanwhile, JNIM tightened its grip. The Russians could not help break the blockade. Goïta, Mali’s interim president, was talked into a strategic pivot engineered by Mali’s new intelligence chief: replace Moscow with Ankara. Turkey offered a $210 million military-equipment package, and the deal changed everything.
Suddenly, a trickle of fuel returned to Bamako. Not enough to normalise the city—but enough to avert collapse.
Sources long dismissive of the blockade now quietly admit that Mali came closer to losing its capital than at any time since 2012.
Iyad Ag Ghali: the Quiet Architect of the Jihadist Surge
Behind this year’s jihadist successes stands Iyad Ag Ghali, the most influential insurgent figure in Africa today.
A Tuareg from the Ifoghas clan, a veteran of the 1990s rebellions, and a former diplomat in Jeddah, Ag Ghali built JNIM into a disciplined coalition of al-Qaeda affiliates spanning Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and now pushing into Benin and Togo.
What’s new in 2025 is the political sophistication of his strategy.
According to sources, Ag Ghali has been studying the ascent of Syria’s Bashar al-Sharāʾ—the pathway that enabled him to consolidate power: threaded alliances with clerics, tribal networks, parts of the army, and a political class fractured by civil war.
Some within JNIM now openly contemplate a similar Sahelian trajectory of alliances with religious elites, tacit understandings with army factions, and ultimately, negotiations leading to political entry.
Ag Ghali appears to see himself as a potential “Sahelian al-Sharāʾ”—a figure who could move from insurgency into political centrality.
But there are limits. JNIM has fewer than 10,000 fighters. Its Sharia-based social codes—gender-segregated buses, bans on music, closures of bars—would be rejected by the millions living in Mali’s cities. And its decentralised structure means that while Ag Ghali is respected, he cannot always control local commanders, as shown last month when fighters near Timbuktu abducted and publicly executed Mariam Cissé, a TikTok influencer, derailing JNIM’s attempts to appear more “moderate.”
Still, Ag Ghali has achieved two extraordinary things: JNIM has never split—a rare feat in the jihadist world; and the group is now fighting on multiple fronts: against the military juntas and against Islamic State units in the tri-border region.
Victory — by anyone — is impossible. But JNIM’s momentum is undeniable.
Burkina Faso: Mythmaking in the Theatre of Failure
If Mali is the battlefield where the outcome will be decided, Burkina Faso is the theatre where illusion has replaced governance.
Burkina’s modern history is a tale of mythmaking. Captain Ibrahim Traoré — hailed, with Russian encouragement, as the heir to the revolutionary hero Thomas Sankara — inherited a country in 2022 where, as one farmer put it, “by day we fear the army, by night the jihadists.”
He expanded the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland (VDP), a force neither voluntary nor national, and saturated the information space with Russian-crafted propaganda accusing France and the U.S. of funding jihadists.
Meanwhile, the genuinely effective anti-jihadist militia Koglweogo was destroyed after its leader was abducted in broad daylight.
Today, 60 per cent of Burkina Faso is under JNIM control. Two million people are displaced, and entire districts have been depopulated. Roads to Djibo, Bobo-Dioulasso, Togo, and Benin are intermittently cut. Only the road to Niamey remains largely open.
The Russians, who midwifed Traoré’s myth, have not sent reinforcements, other than bodyguards to protect the person of the President. They offer slogans, not soldiers.
Traoré, like Goïta in Bamako, is kept going by revenues from the high price of gold and support from the IMF.
Niger: Stable — But ~Cornered
Of the three AES states (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger), Niger is the least imperilled. Fighting persists in Tillabery and along the northern border, which has led to a surge of mass-casualty incidents in 2025: village massacres, attacks on mosques, and ambushes on army units. The capital, however, is secure.
Yet General Abdourahamane Tchiani is hemmed in diplomatically and refuses to release deposed President Mohamed Bazoum.
The AES — the “Alliance of Sahel States” — has become a leaking vessel. Created in 2023 as an anti-Western counter-ECOWAS structure, it has produced flags, anthems, and diplomatic theatrics, but no significant military capability. Its Russian sponsors are distracted; their Africa Corps is a paper tiger. The juntas’ anti-Western posture is ideological performance, not a war-winning strategy.
Across the region, civilians face the worst of it. Jihadist groups routinely target villages, markets, and convoys, while state forces increasingly conduct abusive reprisals. The net effect is a population trapped between insurgents and security actors, and widespread displacement
Meanwhile, the jihadists continue to advance.
Can the Jihadists Win?
Not in the conventional sense. JNIM cannot capture and rule Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey—not with their numbers, not with their ideology, not with their fractured rural-urban appeal.
But nor can the juntas win. Thirteen years of war involving French, UN, and Russian forces have not halted JNIM’s expansion. The insurgency has spread hundreds of kilometres southwards, touching northern Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Togo. It has survived sanctions, coups, foreign interventions, and the collapse of its rivals.
The war has reached a mutually hurting stalemate, the classic condition for negotiation.
Within Mali, there are whispers already. Some have publicly floated the idea of talks with Ag Ghali. Others in the junta hate the idea — its officers still remember JNIM’s execution of captured soldiers in the 2010s. But no military solution exists.
Even Ag Ghali is signalling an interest in negotiations — not as surrender, but as strategy.
The increasing engagement of Turkey — an Islamic country and member of Nato that is potentially trusted by both sides — could be a game-changer.
A Window of Diplomacy?
The Sahel conflict is among the world’s largest wars. The collapse of France’s influence and Russia’s incoherent adventurism have reshaped the battlefield without resolving it.
JNIM will not conquer the Sahel. The juntas will not defeat JNIM. Which leaves only one path: negotiation.
Negotiation not as appeasement, but as recognition of reality. As hard as it may be for those who have been the victims of violence and terrorism, a political settlement — however imperfect — is the only alternative to a war that will grind on indefinitely, drawing in new states, creating new insurgencies, and leaving an expanding arc of stateless space in its wake. At the end of the day what counts is whether it is possible to end the killing and destruction.
Benin’s near coup was not an anomaly. It was a preview.
The Sahel’s fuse is burning. The world is barely watching. And yet a window of diplomacy might at last be opening.
Phillip van Niekerk is the managing partner of Calabar Consulting, a risk consulting company specialising in Africa.
The views expressed are his own. He also publishes “Africa Unscrambled” on Substack.
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