Members of the Ghana Immigration Service patrol their country’s porous border with Burkina Faso, inspecting cars crossing in Gwollu, Ghana. Photo / Guy Peterson, the Washington Post
In the space of just a few months, an al-Qaeda affiliate has overrun major cities in Burkina Faso and Mali.
It has carried out the deadliest-ever attack on soldiers in Benin and expanded its hard-line Islamist rule across the region.
No one knows when its fighters will strike next - or where they plan to stop.
After years spent quietly gaining strength, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) is now the most well-armed militant force in West Africa and among the most powerful in the world, according to regional and Western officials.
There are as many as 6000 fighters under its command.
Local strategies employed to combat JNIM are accelerating its rise, officials and experts say, as atrocities by West African forces have allowed the group to claim the moral high ground and legitimise its growing authority.
The United States has largely pulled back from - or been pushed out - of the fight, leaving in its wake a deepening security vacuum and mounting anxiety over JNIM’s aims and capabilities.
“They’re creating a proto-state that stretches like a belt from western Mali all the way to the borderlands of Benin … It is a substantial - even exponential - expansion,” said Héni Nsaibia, West Africa senior analyst for the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a non-profit research group.
JNIM, along with the rival Islamic State-Sahel Province, has turned the region into an epicentre of Islamist insurgency.
The Institute for Economics and Peace’s annual index last year found 51% of terrorism deaths worldwide were in the Sahel, a vast, tumultuous region south of the Sahara that spans the breadth of Africa.
The chaos ravaging the region has helped military officers seize power in coups - vowing to break with the West and restore calm.
But in most countries, the security situation has only become worse.
In 2024, Burkina Faso ranked as the nation most affected by terrorist violence for a second straight year, and Niger suffered the largest increase in terrorism-related deaths globally.
In a sign of JNIM’s southward spread, Togo reported the most terrorist attacks in its history; Benin has reported nearly as many deaths in the first three months of this year than in all of 2024.
Increasingly, experts say, JNIM’s informant and supply chain networks are stretching into stable nations such as Ghana, Senegal, and Guinea. Governments fear their fighters could soon follow.
The Washington Post interviewed experts and officials in five countries to shed light on why the group is growing so fast - and what its end game might be.
Reporters also travelled to the porous borderlands between Burkina Faso and Ghana, where tens of thousands have fled violence by JNIM and government forces, to speak to refugees about life under militant rule.
They recounted how gun-toting JNIM members burst into mosques in Burkina Faso in recent years, announcing that strict Islamic laws would be implemented, schools would be closed, and state institutions would be targeted.
Violating the rules, the extremists made clear, would carry a price. Nearly 6000 civilians have been killed by the group in the past five years, according to ACLED data.
Refugees said that initially, they rejected the group outright. But their anger was redirected by the Government’s response: a militia-led wave of killing targeting the Fulanis, a semi-nomadic, predominantly Muslim ethnic minority spread out across West Africa. Sceptical locals became eager recruits.
“They were afraid, and they ran to them,” said Amadou Diallo, a 69-year-old Burkinabe refugee, describing his three daughters and their husbands who joined JNIM after militia members killed scores of their fellow Fulani.
As the threat grows across West Africa, the region has largely fallen off the radar in Washington, according to interviews with four current and former US officials. Like other officials in this story, they spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.
American drones once flown from Niger - where US troops were forced out last year by the country’s military junta - have been moved out of West Africa, according to two former US officials with knowledge of the situation. They added that plans to relocate the drones to Ivory Coast and Benin have been scrapped.
There are now fewer than 200 troops in the region, mostly stationed in countries along the coast - down from about 1400 as recently as 2023 - according to current and former officials.
The State Department press office said the US “continues to work with various partners in West Africa to counter the scourge of terrorism from groups like [JNIM]”, and noted that Will Stevens, a top American official in the region, recently visited Burkina Faso, Niger, and Benin “to discuss the growing presence of violent extremist organisations”.
US Africa Command (Africom) declined to comment. A spokesperson pointed to recent remarks by General Michael Langley, the head of Africom, who emphasised that the US was focused on helping African nations build the “self-reliance” to fight terrorism.
But the vast majority of programmes run through the Global Fragility Act - a multiyear initiative intended to bolster stability in vulnerable West African countries - have been shut down by the Trump Administration.
“JNIM is ascendant,” one of the former US officials said. “In a region where we used to monitor what was happening, we no longer have the tools.”
JNIM, founded in Mali in 2017 as an umbrella organisation combining four Islamist extremist groups, is headed by Iyad ag Ghali and Amadou Koufa, leaders of a 2012 uprising that saw separatists and Islamists take over much of the country’s north.
Ag Ghali belongs to the mostly Muslim Tuareg ethnic group, which has fought for decades to establish an independent state in northern Mali. Koufa is a Fulani preacher based in central Mali. The differences between the two men have given the group broad appeal - and contributed to uncertainty about its goals.
The group operates on a “franchise” model, experts say, tailoring its strategies to local customs and its recruiting to local grievances. But wherever its fighters go, they enforce a strict Salafist version of Islamic law.
Ali Diallo, a 53-year-old herder from Burkina Faso’s Boucle du Mouhoun region, was washing himself before prayers at his local mosque in 2023 when a group of bearded men wearing turbans forced him and other men inside and locked the door.
“I thought we were going to die,” Ali Diallo said, recalling that the men wore machine guns across their chests. “But two men stood where the imam usually stood and started preaching. They said their fight was with the Government and their goal was to spread Islam, not to kill us.”
Shortly afterwards, the extremists closed his children’s school.
“We were angry,” said Asseta Diallo, his 19-year-old daughter. “We just started sitting at home.”
Strict dress codes were enforced in the community, with veils required for women and short pants for men. Naming and wedding ceremonies were banned. Loud music too.
In its strongholds in central and southern Mali, experts say, the group has made agreements with communities that compel residents to adhere to JNIM’s rules and pay zakat, or taxes, in exchange for not being attacked.
In recent months, these local pacts have allowed JNIM to shift its focus and move its manpower to neighbouring Burkina Faso and coastal nations such as Benin.
“These guys are smart, sophisticated, and evolving,” said Corinne Dufka, a veteran Sahel analyst based in Washington. “And now, there is a model for mainstreaming their political evolution.”
Some of JNIM’s senior figures, Dufka said, are looking to Ahmed al-Sharaa - the Syrian leader who has recast himself as a moderate after once being associated with al-Qaeda - as a potential model for their own trajectory.
When Sharaa’s rebel group overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s regime last year, JNIM issued a statement of congratulations. And when Koufa was interviewed by a French journalist in October, he did not mention al-Qaeda, prompting speculation about a possible break with the group.
Western and West African officials and experts estimate JNIM has between 5000 and 6000 combatants but say a lack of intelligence makes it difficult to arrive at a definitive figure.
Fighters have long targeted symbols of foreign influence in the region, including attacks against French and United Nations forces, and more recently have threatened Russian mercenaries fighting alongside Malian troops.
Aneliese Bernard, a former State Department adviser who now runs a private security firm working in West Africa, said the group has metastasised to such an extent that it now “directly impacts [US] national security”.
And, she added, “they are expanding undeterred into the countries we have long considered robust security partners”.
Military officers have staged coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in response to the growing violence, promising an all-out war against the extremists.
In Burkina Faso, President Ibrahim Traoré’s strategy has hinged on arming more than 50,000 militia members, who have committed scores of atrocities, rights groups say.
Each attack has become a recruiting opportunity for JNIM.
In March, in the town of Solenzo, Burkina Faso, government militias killed dozens of mostly Fulani civilians and filmed the aftermath, according to rights groups. Videos shared by the perpetrators on social media showed the dead, including women and children, piled into trucks.
In the days after the attack, JNIM released videos condemning the Government.
“These miscreants want us to fight back and kill innocent women and kids … which will lead to a civil war,” said one JNIM leader in another video. “Yet our fight is not to defend a country or an ethnicity, but religion instead.”
The videos were part a wider propaganda blitz by the group during Ramadan in March. Fighters in brightly coloured headscarves were filmed in action at training camps, or reading from the Quran, guns propped in front of them.
Since 2019, the group has killed more than 5800 civilians in the region, according to ACLED; about 9600 civilians have been killed by regional militaries and government-allied militias. In areas where JNIM has achieved strong control, violent attacks against civilians tend to decline, analysts say
When Amadou Diallo learned that his daughters and their husbands had joined JNIM, he said he was so distraught that he stopped sleeping. But then, he said, he thought of his three cousins who had been killed by government militias. Village elders had told Fulani residents to leave, that they could no longer protect them.
“The alternative was death,” he said. “At least now I hope they are safe.”
Long-haul truck driver Yakubu Janwi travels across the region, a dangerous job that gives him a window into JNIM’s expanding influence.
The group controls many of the major roads in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, he said. Truck owners have cut deals with the militants to ensure drivers are not stopped.
During one dispute over payment, he said, JNIM members seized his truck full of tea and left him wandering in the bush. He was rescued by another driver about 24 hours later, he said, but it took his boss a full year to get the vehicle back.
The trucking agreements are just one strand in a complex web of illicit commerce that JNIM uses to finance its insurgency.
Members are involved in gold mining in Burkina Faso and Mali, according to experts and a former member of the group. Others engineer massive cattle-rustling schemes, including in Ghana, run kidnapping networks, or are involved in smuggling drugs and motorcycles.
Analysts say an increasingly large share of JNIM’s funding comes from the taxes levied on communities in Mali and Burkina Faso.
Solidifying its base of operations has allowed the group to devote more resources to attacks in Benin, said Andrew Lebovich, a research fellow with the Clingendael Institute.
An ambush last month in the far north of the country killed 54 soldiers, the military said. Soldiers were caught off guard, according to a Benin military official. “It is hard to track their movement,” the official said.
JNIM is now actively recruiting in Benin, according to the official and experts. In the country’s far north, recruiters now openly present themselves to local leaders, as they did when they first moved into parts of Burkina Faso and Mali.
The group’s weapons come largely from the government forces it has defeated, according to a recent report by Conflict Armament Research.
There have been so many of those defeats that JNIM has been able to amass a formidable arsenal of machine guns, drones, and anti-aircraft weaponry - and has demonstrated it can deploy them to deadly effect.
Last month, JNIM took control of Djibo, a regional capital in northern Burkina Faso - killing scores of soldiers and civilians and holding the city from 5am to 2pm.
Fighters posed for pictures on the streets and in government offices, including under a photo of Traoré, and vowed they were coming for the young president.
At a recent US-led military training in Tamale, in northern Ghana - a stand-alone Africom exercise spared from the Trump Administration’s regional cuts - soldiers from Ghana, Benin, and Ivory Coast said the images from Djibo circulated in their WhatsApp groups. JNIM is now top of mind across the region.
“They’re more violent, more organised and have more means,” said a military official from Ivory Coast. “They wanted to spread Islam at first, but now it seems like they want to get all the way to the sea.”
That theory was echoed by a US official, who said the group sees its expansion as a kind of “manifest destiny”, and appears to be pushing for a route to the Atlantic, which would dramatically increase the reach of its smuggling networks.
Ghana, a nation of 33 million still seen as a bright spot of stability and democracy in West Africa, has not been attacked yet by JNIM.
Officials from neighbouring countries have told their Ghanaian counterparts to be on guard. Already, regional officials and experts said, JNIM is using Ghana to restock its supplies and rest its fighters after assaults in Burkina Faso.
Along the countries’ shared border, which is marked by narrow, sandy footpaths and potholed roads, a group of Ghanaian immigration officers are doing their best to patrol, but said they need more resources.
Sixteen officers are tasked with guarding the 16km border. They can often hear the echo of gunshots on the other side.
“Burkinabes cross every day, and they tell us what is happening there,” said Gabriel Afful, one of the officers.
Was he nervous about the future? Afful simply nodded.
New York Times: It mirrors a pattern occurring with other cancers since the 1990s.