The Hostage Economy: How Kidnapping Funds the Sahel's Wars

In the space of a few weeks this summer, three separate prisoner releases took place in the Sahel, each one with its own significance: the American Christian missionary Kevin Rideout by the Islamic State Sahel Province, eighty-eight Malian soldiers and, separately, two Wagner mercenaries by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), and a French DGSE agent by the Malian junta.

While the exact arrangements remain disputed, given the lack of official information surrounding such deals and the unwillingness of most actors to admit to negotiating with the other side, they share the same underlying logic: hostages as a form of currency, whether the holder is a government, a rebel movement or hardline jihadists such as the Islamic State. What each group takes, why, and how they keep benefiting from the system is key to understanding the entire Sahel conflict.

How kidnapping became an industry

Kidnapping foreigners is not new in the Sahelo-Saharan belt - a stretch of arid land that spans the continent, and has become the global epicenter for terrorism. In 2003, the Algerian jihadist group GSPC, which would later become al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, took 32 tourists, mostly Europeans, as hostages and held them for months until Germany reportedly paid a hefty sum in exchange for their release. The payment was denied by Berlin, and it set the stage for a long pattern of ransoms quietly paid to jihadists by state actors who’d rather their public didn’t know.

It also taught the jihadists a lesson they would not forget: a handful of Westerners could be worth more than a dozen battlefield victories. Over the following decade, the Malian north turned into the region's holding pen, where hostages seized in neighbouring countries such as Niger, Mauritania, and Algeria were moved and held, sometimes for years, in the hope that their governments would pay. In 2014, a New York Times investigation estimated that al-Qaeda and its affiliates had collected well over $100 million in ransoms since 2008, most of it from European treasuries, with AQIM the single largest earner.

Notable cases include the kidnapping of South African Stephen McGown and Swede Johan Gustafsson, both taken in Timbuktu in 2011 and held for six years until 2017. French aid worker Sophie Pétronin, kidnapped in Gao in 2016, walked free in October 2020 alongside Malian opposition leader Soumaïla Cissé and two Italians, in exchange for some 200 jihadist prisoners. French journalist Olivier Dubois, held by JNIM from 2021, was released in March 2023 on the same day as American aid worker Jeffery Woodke, who had spent more than six years in captivity.

The cases that ended differently are just as instructive. Brit Edwin Dyer was killed in 2009 and Frenchman Michel Germaneau in 2010, both after their governments declined to meet ransom demands.

The hostage industry also made way for bandit groups and gangs to cooperate with jihadists, the latter sending out calls that they were willing to "buy" Western hostages. In the case of the Spanish national captured in Algeria in 2025, he was taken by a group of inexperienced young men willing to make a quick buck by selling him to the Islamic State; they were intercepted by the FLA before they could reach ISSP's heartland in Mali, and he was freed. This resale market is why attribution in kidnapping cases is often uncertain: the individuals that seize a hostage are  frequently not directly linked to the group that holds them.

Who takes whom and why

The most striking shift in recent years is that JNIM appears to have completely changed its policies regarding the kidnapping of Western individuals, with the last Western hostages cleared out between 2020 and 2023. Since then, the group has not been credibly linked to the seizure of a single Western national.

This aligns with JNIM's continued attempts to legitimise itself as a responsible governing authority by negotiating with local elders, softening the harshest applications of Islamic law, and striking opportunistic deals with state and non-state actors, all to whitewash its image in contrast to their rival the Islamic State. This aims to prevent global outrage and paint their own enemies as the aggressor, rather than placing the West as their direct enemy, which could jeopardise their relationships with state actors.

To be cynical about it, the group also no longer needs the money in the same way. JNIM now taxes livestock, gold sites, markets and trade routes across vast areas; kidnapping continues but no longer targets Westerners. Perceived allies of the AES juntas that rule Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger are the most at risk, with dozens of Chinese nationals kidnapped in recent years, along with at least one Iranian and several Indians. These remain low stakes due to the unwillingness of those countries to negotiate at all to free their citizens, and because these kidnappings very rarely make the headlines. The kidnapping of local officials is also common and is used as leverage for the liberation of captured militants.

However, JNIM still has not entirely given up on kidnapping high-value targets, the most important example being the Emirati retired general kidnapped along with two of his associates south of the capital Bamako, by chance, by low-tier JNIM militants. The UAE being a staunch ally of the AES alliance, this gave the jihadists rare leverage to use the situation to their advantage without even risking a special forces operation, which a Western country could have possibly pulled off.

This incident resulted in an estimated ransom payment of around $50 million in cash to JNIM, alongside some rumoured equipment promised to the group by the UAE but very unlikely to have ever been delivered.

The Islamic State Sahel Province made a polar opposite choice. While it did not dominate the Sahelian kidnapping market in the past like the al-Qaeda affiliates, due to the lack of opportunities in Mali and Burkina Faso - where JNIM and its predecessors are top dog - ISSP's advances in Niger in recent years have provided the group with a low-competition hunting ground. In 2025 alone, abductions carried out by the group or on its behalf included at least one Austrian, a Swiss, an American, five Indians and the Spaniard mentioned above, who was freed before he could be handed over.

The Islamic State has historically used Western hostages as leverage not specifically for ransom but also for sending messages globally and legitimising their struggle. The clearest example is the kidnapping of US-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff, beheaded on camera in 2014 as "retaliation" for US airstrikes against the group in Iraq. This practice now appears to have changed, especially for the more secretive IS provinces in Africa: the group, likely deeming that money is more valuable than fame and headlines, appears to be much more willing to negotiate, as observed in the Rideout incident.

The FLA plays a whole different game, holding captives as prisoners of war rather than hostages. The rebel group holds Russian and Malian troops and recently released 88 of the latter for alleged "humanitarian reasons," a pretext which raised more than one eyebrow. Between 2023 and 2026 the FLA captured hundreds of Malian soldiers, including prominent officers. Compared to JNIM or the Islamic State, the FLA has completely refrained from kidnapping foreign civilians no matter which country they're from, focusing instead on military targets, which helps it gain recognition as a more legitimate armed group than the jihadists.

The Malian junta works in a similar way, trading prisoners for diplomatic leverage or to alleviate pressure, while still legitimising their captivity as prisoners rather than hostages. In 2022 the Malian military regime held captive 49 Ivorian soldiers, sentencing 46 of them to 20 years in prison but then granting them a presidential pardon only a few months later, following regional pressure and increasingly souring relations with its southern neighbour.

The middlemen

Three of the most recent releases — Vézilier, Rideout, and the two Wagner mercenaries — came within days of each other, and in none of them was the country whose citizen was in captivity able to resolve the case itself. This shows how indispensable the brokers' role has become in these negotiations, and how much they stand to gain from them, using the opportunity to increase their influence and strengthen their relationship with one side over the other.

Yann Vézilier was arrested in Bamako on 13 August 2025, alongside roughly ten Malian officers. A DGSE officer accredited under diplomatic cover as second secretary at the French embassy, he was accused of running a network to mobilise politicians, civil society figures and soldiers against the transitional authorities. France denied the claims, and what followed was a year-long political struggle between Paris and Bamako. Exactly a year after his arrest, the French agent was freed by presidential pardon granted by Assimi Goïta.

The junta thanked an unnamed "brotherly country" for the good and discreet offices which had facilitated the operation, and Le Monde identified Morocco as the middleman between France and Mali. Several of the Malian officers arrested alongside Vézilier are still in detention.

Kevin Rideout's release followed the same logic with a different broker, this time the Libyan National Army's deputy commander Saddam Haftar, who negotiated with the Islamic State Sahel Province in Washington's stead and, according to sources familiar with the deal, paid $12 million to the group in exchange for the missionary's liberation. Only a few days later, Haftar surfaced again with another successful release, this time of two Wagner mercenaries captured by the FLA in July 2024. Libya's role in those negotiations was confirmed by the Africa Corps itself, and it is highly likely that a ransom was paid, in weapons or cash, to the FLA.

Three releases, two mediators, and in no case was the principal government, Western or Russian, able to secure its own people. That is the more consequential development. Mali's rupture with France and Niger's expulsion of American forces removed not only troops but the relationships that used to resolve these cases. What has replaced them is a market for brokerage, in which Rabat, Abu Dhabi, Doha and now eastern Libya can trade their access for improved relations with other powers. Haftar, an unrecognised commander of a divided country, has made himself useful to a Washington that long backed his rivals.

What the money buys and what to expect

Only six months after receiving a staggering ransom from the UAE for the captured general, JNIM and its partner the FLA together launched their biggest offensive in years. Whether the two events are directly correlated is not known, but it is highly likely that these funds contributed to the success of the April 25th operations.

The uses of ransom money for these groups are legion. It can be used for fuel, supplies, bribing officials and paying compensation to the families of deceased fighters. There is even direct testimony on how the money moves down the chain. In an audio message, former JNIM commander Sadou — who later defected to ISSP and was killed a few months afterwards by JNIM — said he had received between $115,000 and $230,000 as his battalion's share of the UAE ransom. Such amounts are distributed to battalion commanders to meet the needs of their fighters and keep their own campaigns going.

The same will likely be true for ISSP after receiving its own significant ransom from Libya's Haftar in exchange for Rideout, though how that influx of cash will manifest itself remains to be seen.

There is no clean way out of this. Refusing to pay condemns hostages to death, as Britain and France discovered with Dyer and Germaneau. Paying, however, finances the next rebel offensive and raises the price of the next foreigner taken. Handing the payment to a third country preserves the appearance of a no-concessions policy while transferring leverage to intermediaries with their own agendas, and those intermediaries have every interest in keeping the market alive.

For over two decades, kidnapping in the Sahelo-Saharan belt was treated as a mere criminal sideshow to the war. It has now become an indispensable mechanism that funds the war itself. Insurgents who have seen how effective the method is will undoubtedly try it again until it stops working, and with the jihadists steadily expanding south towards the Gulf of Guinea, the risk will not remain confined to the Sahelian states for long, but will soon extend to their coastal neighbours.