SECURITYJuly 10, 2026

Sahel collapse: State partition, rising militias and risk to Europe

Federica Saini Fasanotti

Reading time: 13 min

Mali’s escalating crisis reveals how state failure, insurgency and resource competition increasingly intertwine.

On May 21, 2026, the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., hosted a panel entitled “A Conversation with the Ambassadors of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger: The Sahel at a Crossroads,” bringing together envoys to the United States from three Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The ambassadors’ statements were revealing and conveyed a shared political opposition to Europe and the U.S. In essence, they claimed that terrorism did not exist in their countries until it was introduced by Western mercenaries (whom they did not name), that international reporting on their countries is wholly fabricated and that their governments will never again permit other (Western) nations to conduct military operations within their borders. This is a rather novel narrative. 

It is an undisputed fact that security in the Sahel has significantly deteriorated in recent years, following the withdrawal of Western troops. The resulting vacuum has not been neatly filled by Russian private military companies – such as the former Wagner group, subsequently the Africa Corps – but even more so by separatist militias and Islamist terrorist organizations.

The trend is most pronounced in Mali, where chaos is fracturing power structures and may split the country while putting the military junta on the defensive. Violence risks spilling into neighboring countries across western, northern and central parts of Africa and highlights Europe’s proximity to a rapidly worsening geopolitical hotspot.

The Islamic State Sahel Province (IS Sahel) is a violent extremist group that has been inflicting serious harm and committing severe human rights abuses. The organization has been expanding its territorial control across wide areas near the Mali-Niger border, even as it faces escalating clashes with a rival Islamist group, Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM). The latter, an affiliate of al-Qaeda in the Sahel, is also notorious for its widespread violence.

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Facts & figures

Jihadist pressure mounts in Mali’s east

None of these developments occurred by chance. For months, Mali has been at the epicenter of the Sahel crisis: Jihadist attacks – which mercenaries from Moscow were invited to Mali to combat − have in fact multiplied despite the Russian presence, creating an increasingly dangerous vortex that threatens the stability of the military junta governing the country since 2021.

Mali’s breaking point

From April 25 to 27, 2026, the Azawad Liberation Front (ALF), a Tuareg separatist group aiming to secede from Mali and create an ethnic Tuareg state, joined forces with jihadists from JNIM to launch a series of coordinated attacks. These assaults targeted Kati, sites near the capital city Bamako, Modibo Keita International Airport and several urban centers in central and northern Mali, including Gao, Kidal, Sevare and Mopti.

The attack in Kati, a town 15 kilometers northwest of Bamako and home to Mali’s main military base, killed the defense minister, Sadio Camara, and wounded senior intelligence and military officials. After facing violent clashes from the insurgents and to prevent being wiped out, Russia’s Africa Corps – long supporting coup leader and current Malian President Assimi Goita – retreated from Kidal and several other northern positions following an agreement with the ALF and mediated by Algeria, to prevent further destabilization near its borders. In May, JNIM established checkpoints around Bamako and publicly called for the overthrow of the junta.

From Libya to the Tuareg rebellion

The roots of the current crisis in the Sahel can be traced to two distinct events.

The first is the longstanding grievances of Mali’s Tuareg population – an Amazigh-origin pastoralist people inhabiting the vast desert and semi-desert regions of northern Mali known as Azawad – who have risen against the central government in Bamako on multiple occasions since independence in 1960. The Tuareg case rests on decades of abandonment, marginalization and the repeated failure of Mali’s government to deliver development, security or meaningful political representation to their northern regions.

The second is NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, which delivered the final blow to Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, leaving his own heavily armed Tuareg militias to return to their homelands across the Sahel.

The convergence of these two dynamics triggered the 2012 Tuareg rebellion, in which the secular-nationalist National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) seized control of northern Mali before being displaced by the intervention of several jihadist factions: Ansar Dine, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO).

France intervened through Operation Serval in 2013 and the broader counterinsurgency effort Operation Barkhane, followed by the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). These efforts restrained the jihadist advance and produced the 2015 Algiers Agreement between Bamako and the Tuareg-led coalition. This accord, however, was never substantively implemented.

By 2020, large parts of Mali lay beyond effective government control, and the coups of 2020 and 2021 brought Colonel Goita to power. In actions touted as restoring Malian sovereignty, he expelled French forces in 2022, terminated the MINUSMA mandate in 2023 and formally ended the Algiers Agreement in 2024.

Yet, unable to stop oncoming jihadists with the junta’s forces alone, Mr. Goita turned to Russian private military companies for security support.

In 2023, Mali joined Burkina Faso and Niger – both similarly governed by post-coup juntas – to form the Alliance of Sahel States, and in early 2025 withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States.

Central questions remain: Who is fighting for whom and how do crises in the Sahel and Mali affect external actors with interests in Africa, namely Europe and China?

Tuareg separatists: The Azawad Liberation Front

The ALF, led by Alghabass Ag Intalla, serves as the primary vehicle for Tuareg secessionist ambitions, bringing together surviving elements of the MNLA, the High Council for the Unity of Azawad and components of the Arab Movement of Azawad. Its stated objective is independence, or at a minimum, substantial autonomy for its territories. The ALF is secular in orientation, professes adherence to international humanitarian law and frames its struggle in nationalist rather than religious terms. Its decision in April 2026 to coordinate operations with the al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist coalition is the most striking.

Jihadist actors: JNIM and IS Sahel

JNIM was established in 2017 through the merger of Ansar Dine, the Saharan branch of AQIM, the Macina Liberation Front and Al-Mourabitoun. Its primary objective – pursued with considerable operational capability – is the establishment of a Salafist Islamist state across the Sahel.

To achieve this goal, since September 2025, the group has operated by both disrupting fuel and essential goods supplies from Senegal, Mauritania and Ivory Coast, and by systematically attacking mining infrastructure in the three countries. In rural areas across central and northern Mali, JNIM has developed parallel institutions, albeit unevenly: informal courts that adjudicate land and family disputes, taxation regimes for livestock and trade, and protection arrangements with local communities frustrated by state absence or actively harmed by human rights abuses attributed to the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) and the Africa Corps.

Any durable Malian counter-strategy must contend with the jihadist project in the Sahel, which has evolved from merely an insurgency challenge to a proto-governance challenge. Notwithstanding this, and despite the presence of active cells in the vicinity of the capital, the announcement on April 28 of a total siege of Bamako remains unconvincing: The encirclement does not appear to be complete.

IS Sahel, a minor rival of JNIM since their open split in 2019, is present in the Triple Border area near Menaka and along the border with Niger.

The junta’s fragile power base

The Malian state under Colonel Goita’s junta rests on three pillars: the roughly 25,000-strong FAMa, the Africa Corps and the irregular Dozo militias – traditional hunter-warrior associations drawn primarily from the Bambara and Don communities – which provide localized territorial defense in central Mali.

This coalition conceals an extraordinary degree of complexity. The conflict is not a simple confrontation between Tuareg or jihadist insurgents and the Bamako government. It is an intercommunal struggle in which Fulani pastoralists – one of the Sahel’s principal nomadic populations – have been disproportionately recruited into JNIM’s Macina Liberation Front, while sedentary Bambara and Dogon communities have organized self-defense militias that have not hesitated to systematically target Fulani civilians.

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Facts & figures

ECOWAS after the Sahel split

The April attacks struck the Kati garrison, the symbolic seat of military power and the very base from which Mr. Goita conducted his own coup, killing his defense minister in his own residence. The cost to the junta’s credibility has been considerable.

Russia’s Africa Corps stumbles

The paramilitary Africa Corps took over the bulk of the Wagner group’s African military engagement following the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died after he led an uprising in Russia against the government of Vladimir Putin. Africa Corps has been under Kremlin control since 2023. Its Mali deployment stands at approximately 2,000 personnel – a negligible figure when compared to the 20,000 international troops once deployed under MINUSMA and Barkhane. To date, this formation has demonstrated less appetite for risk in confronting jihadists than its Wagner predecessor and instead has a stronger focus on protecting the regime. But like Wagner forces, Africa Corps too has a pronounced propensity for violence against civilians.

Read more by counterinsurgency expert Federica Saini Fasanotti

• Libya’s fractures drift toward permanence
• Juntas and Moscow reshaping Sahel alliances
• Greece’s defense spending goals and geopolitical ambitions

Africa Corps’ withdrawal from Kidal, escorted by its adversaries, the ALF, at the end of April, represents a significant embarrassment for Moscow and has potential ramifications across its African client states, where the reliability of the Russian security model is now an open question. In this regard, Algeria – following a period of considerable tensions with Bamako – may be repositioning itself as the historic patron of Tuareg negotiations. Its mediation of the Russian withdrawal represents a meaningful reassertion of Algerian regional standing.

Africa Corps’ withdrawal from Kidal … represents a significant embarrassment for Moscow and has potential ramifications across its African client states.

The AES governments, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, have accused Ukraine – a country in its fifth year of fighting Russian invaders on its own soil − of providing intelligence and material support to Tuareg forces in retaliation for Russian operations in Mali. This claim was submitted to the UN Security Council in August 2024 and reiterated by the Africa Corps in the wake of the April attacks.

Implications for European, Chinese and American interests

Turkiye and the U.S. have made diplomatic overtures toward Bamako and Niamey, likely as part of a strategic calculus to secure access to critical mineral exports and the drone market for Ankara.

China, which already holds operational control over the Goulamina and Bougouni lithium assets in southern Mali, remains the most influential and least scrutinized external actor in the theater.

Uranium production is a feature of Niger, not of Mali. Niger’s Somair mine was nationalized in 2025, depriving the French company Orano of rights held for over half a century, prompting the firm to seek alternative supplies from Botswana, Namibia and Kazakhstan.

A jihadist disruption of Niger’s uranium output could precipitate a short-term fuel supply crisis for Western Europe’s nuclear sector that no diversification strategy could resolve in time.

The European Commission launched the ReSourceEU Action Plan in early 2026, with 3 billion euros in funding, to diversify critical raw material sourcing. It is here that Mali becomes directly relevant. The Mali crisis threatens to destabilize the AES’s security architecture, with potential spillover into Niger’s Agadez region, where uranium is produced. JNIM is already present in that area, as is IS Sahel. A jihadist disruption of Niger’s uranium output could precipitate a short-term fuel supply crisis for Western Europe’s nuclear sector that no diversification strategy could resolve in time.

Furthermore, Mali itself is a significant gold producer and, if projected output targets are met, is expected to become Africa’s second-largest lithium supplier in 2026. Yet its estimated 890,000 tons of lithium reserves may not be commercially accessible due to systemic instability.

Similar assets, under Chinese management in southern Mali, are already at risk, as illustrated by both the attack on the Morila gold mine in January 2026 and the kidnapping of four Chinese nationals in the Narena gold-mining area. China’s engagement in the Sahel extends beyond lithium extraction in Mali to gold and uranium across the wider region. Its strategic position is of particular significance. Beijing can operate in security environments that are prohibitive for Western actors and is indifferent to human rights and local welfare considerations. China’s on-the-ground presence in the Sahel, regardless of the governments in power, is now sufficiently entrenched to warrant serious attention.

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