West Africa's Jihadist Groups Are at War. Here's Why.

On 1 September, jihadist insurgent group JNIM assembled a large force in eastern Burkina Faso and moved against Islamic State positions in the stretch of country between Dori and the Malian border. Islamic State fighters were waiting, and instead of absorbing the assault they counter-attacked. By the end of it JNIM had lost roughly 200 men killed, including two senior commanders, with hundreds more wounded and a significant quantity of weapons and vehicles left in the field. It was among the heaviest single defeats the group has suffered in its existence, and it was not inflicted by any army.

This is the part of the Sahel's war that outside observers find hardest to explain. JNIM and the Islamic State Sahel Province recruit from the same communities, operate across the same territory, fight the same secular governments and the same Russian mercenaries, and both say they are fighting to establish Islamic rule. They have nevertheless spent close to a decade killing one another. The usual explanation is competition for terrain, taxes, and recruits, and that is part of it. But treating it as the whole explanation makes the conflict look more irrational than it is. The two groups are also engaged in a genuine theological argument, one with a long history behind it, and one which is having an undoubted impact on the wider Sahel conflict.

The Defector’s Case

In February 2026, a senior JNIM commander in eastern Burkina Faso defected to the Islamic State Sahel Province. In the weeks that followed Sadou released a series of audio statements that circulated widely through both groups' online networks, setting out his reasons in detail. What makes them valuable is not that he attacked his former organisation (something defectors always do) but rather that almost every charge he brought was doctrinal rather than personal.

Sadou’s central charge was that JNIM - an offshoot of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) - does not apply the hudud, the fixed punishments prescribed in Islamic law, and had no intention of doing so. A thief in JNIM territory, for example, would be imprisoned or killed rather than have his hand amputated. A fighter who committed adultery would be ignored if he was unmarried, and given three hundred lashes if he was married, a penalty that corresponds to nothing in the classical law, which he said had been agreed at the level of AQIM's leadership.

Sadou claimed he had raised the matter repeatedly in meetings with senior JNIM and AQIM figures, and had been told each time that politics and limited capacity made it impossible. The same leadership, he noted, had no difficulty collecting zakat (the obligatory alms tax) from the population under its control.

His second charge concerned the label each group throws at the other. JNIM routinely describes the Islamic State as khawarij (an early sect notorious for declaring other Muslims apostates and killing them); he argued the accusation has no foundation in Islamic scriptures, and amounts to a slur used to avoid an argument.

The third was the one he seems to have taken hardest. Sadou described attending a meeting with seven JNIM regional commanders at which they were informed that a truce had been agreed with Benin, a decision that had come down from AQIM's leadership. There were objections: the commanders were already fighting Beninese forces and saw no reason to stop. They were pressed into accepting it regardless. For Sadou the arrangement was illegitimate in principle, since it is not for a Muslim to seek reconciliation with apostates, and he made the same objection to a comparable understanding with Côte d'Ivoire.

What followed made it worse. The JNIM emir at Fada N'Gourma ordered his fighters to hold the Beninese border, not against the Beninese but against the Islamic State, to prevent its men from crossing to attack Beninese forces and expand into the country. A group that would not fight the apostate state itself was now guarding that state's frontier against those who would. In his recordings, Sadou cited this as one of the decisive reasons for his departure.

The ex-commander’s final point was designed to preempt the accusation he knew was coming: that he had left for money. Sadou said he had been comfortable in JNIM and had no material reason to go. When he defected he was holding fifty million CFA francs belonging to the organisation, roughly $85,000, which he handed over to the overall commander in eastern Burkina Faso, along with his battalion's share of the ransom the UAE had paid the previous year for the release of an Emirati captive. Both sums were within his reach and he left them behind, he said, as proof of his intent. What moved him was a conviction that had formed slowly while he waited for a promised application of Islamic law, and hardened when he became certain it would never come.

What his defection set off is the reason the September battle happened. In July, five months after Sadou left, JNIM killed him in Burkina Faso. A month later, it killed the Islamic State's emir in the country. Neither died in battle; both appear to have been tracked and targeted on prior intelligence, which is a different kind of campaign from the raids and ambushes the two groups had traded for years. The attack near Dori on 1 September came out of that sequence, and the Islamic State appears to have anticipated it.

The Answer

JNIM has never replied to Sadou’s accusations, and that silence is itself informative. The Islamic State launches broadsides against JNIM constantly and in detail: in the pages of its weekly newspaper, in the statements of its fighters, and in a long-form documentary released in 2025 laying out the history of the quarrel and the doctrinal case against its rival at length. JNIM produces almost nothing comparable. Its media output is overwhelmingly about the national armies of the Sahel states, the Russians and the militias, and it mentions the Islamic State only rarely.

The paradox is that JNIM's restraint is entirely rhetorical. By my own monitoring of these clashes, it is JNIM that initiates the large majority of the engagements between the two, including the September attack near Dori, and JNIM that loses most of them. When the Islamic State attacks, it is usually to take ground and keep it.

The fullest public statement of the al-Qaeda position came not from JNIM at all but from AQIM, its parent organisation, in an audio message released in April 2023 - long before Sadou defected. Its argument was unusually direct: the Islamic State in the Sahel had to be destroyed, and fighting it was a more urgent obligation than fighting the unbelievers and apostates who rule the region's states. The speaker, Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri, devoted much of the message to reassuring fighters who might hesitate at the prospect of killing other Muslims, telling them the fight was legitimate jihad, a religious duty, and that those who died in it died as martyrs. He classified the Islamic State not as spies or impostors, the accusations jihadist groups often reach for, but as khawarij, and he reached back to the Armed Islamic Group in 1990s Algeria as a warning of what a movement that kills Muslims indiscriminately does to the reputation of every group around it.

That message, delivered when the Islamic State was making gains around Ménaka, says two things at once. It concedes that the argument is theological rather than territorial. And it shows that the al-Qaeda tradition worries about exactly what Sadou accused it of: that restraint on takfir, the act of declaring another Muslim an apostate, pushed far enough, starts to look to its own men like an unwillingness to fight.

The Nigerian mirror

The Sahel makes it look as though the Islamic State is always the more hardline of the two traditions. Nigeria shows that it is not.

JAS (Jama'atu Ahlus-Sunnah Lidda'Awati Wal Jihad), more widely known by their nickname Boko Haram, was built by Muhammad Yusuf, who spent years assembling a network across the northeast before Nigerian police extrajudicially killed him in 2009. His followers were killed, captured or scattered. Abubakar Shekau, wounded in the crackdown, resurfaced some time later and reactivated what Yusuf had built. As one of the most senior of Yusuf's surviving students, he inherited the deference owed to the teacher. That inheritance explains why so many stayed with him even as he departed from Yusuf's ideology, which had never extended takfir to the general Muslim population.

Shekau's armed campaign quickly ran into urban populations that sided with the government, which strengthened his claim that those populations were themselves apostates. What followed were years in which the group massacred Muslims and Christians alike on the basis of where they lived.

The objections came from inside. Yusuf's sons, Abu Musab al-Barnawi and Abu Rumaisa, along with al-Mainuki and a number of their associates, pressed Shekau to stop. He had critics flogged, imprisoned and killed, but Yusuf's sons he largely spared, protected by their father's name. As the Islamic State rose in Iraq and Syria, al-Barnawi's circle urged Shekau to pledge allegiance to Baghdadi, arguing it would bring funding, visibility and legitimacy. The unstated purpose was to place someone above him who could hold him to account. Shekau eventually pledged, JAS became the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and the channel to IS central was kept in the hands of al-Barnawi and al-Mainuki.

Months of counsel from the centre changed nothing. In 2016 IS deposed Shekau in the pages of its weekly newspaper, and named al-Barnawi in his place. Shekau refused, denounced the new leadership as traitors and apostates who had deceived the caliphate, and took his loyalists back to the old name of JAS. Five years of war followed, Shekau holding his seat in the Sambisa forest, which two decades of army operations had never cleared. In 2021 ISWAP moved on it, swiftly subduing Shekau’s forces, until al-Barnawi's men encircled Shekau's compound and called on him through loudspeakers to surrender. He killed himself with an explosive instead.

What ISWAP built from there is the point. Its senior leadership is well educated and strikingly bureaucratic, and it has standardized almost everything: IED production, training camps, squads, uniforms and ranks, zakat collection, a military police and a civilian hisbah (morality police), schools, free pharmacies, public water and transport. Looting civilians is prohibited on pain of losing a hand or more. Its fighters are disciplined in a way Shekau's never were.

JAS survives in the hands of the hardliners who found even ISWAP too strict on protecting the population from the looting they were accustomed to. Today, it is entrenched under Bakura, Shekau’s successor and one of his staunchest loyalists, in the Lake Chad basin and Ngulde in the Mandara Mountains, terrain ISWAP has struggled to penetrate; it has taken heavier losses fighting Bakura's navy on the lake than fighting the Nigerian army. Bakura keeps Shekau's position intact: anyone living under the secular state, or now under ISWAP, is a legitimate target for killing and plunder.

In short, franchise labels explain nothing on their own. In Nigeria, the Islamic State's affiliate is the restrained party, governing rather than subduing. In the Sahel, its affiliate is the absolutist.

The Deeper Argument

Strip away the terminology and the two sides are arguing about one question: who still counts as a Muslim. Everything else follows from the answer. Calling one side extremists and the other moderates tells you nothing, because both are making precise claims, and each accuses the other of a specific error with a long history in Islamic thought.

Al-Qaeda's charge is that the Islamic State excommunicates (takfirs) too freely. When it calls the group khawarij, it is invoking the earliest sect in Islamic history to declare fellow Muslims apostates over sin and kill them for it, a byword for such excess ever since. In the Sahel the accusation is aimed at the Islamic State's willingness to place soldiers, state officials and rival armed factions outside the faith. There is a second move embedded in it: the khawarij's other defining crime was rebellion against legitimate Muslim authority, so in using the label, al-Qaeda is quietly casting itself as that authority.

The problem is that the label fits someone else better. The historical khawarij also declared apostate any Muslim who stayed under non-Muslim rule instead of emigrating to the territory of the believers. The Islamic State has said repeatedly that ordinary Muslims remain Muslims wherever they live, and the fullest statement of that position came from Nigeria, in a book by al-Barnawi and his brother arguing the case against Shekau point by point. It was Shekau's faction that held residence under the secular state to be apostasy, and it is JAS that holds it today. The charge AQIM aims at its rival lands on a group that belongs to neither camp.

The Islamic State's charge runs in the opposite direction. It does not accuse JNIM of error but of apostasy outright, on two main grounds. The first is abandoning the requirements of Islamic law, which is precisely what Sadou spent his statements documenting. The second is alliance with apostates and unbelievers, for which it points to JNIM's pact with the FLA in Mali and its dealings with militias in Burkina Faso.

Once the question is put that way, the practical differences make sense. If cooperating with apostates is itself apostasy, no alliance is permissible, which is why the Islamic State has never made one. JNIM has made several: openly with a secular Tuareg movement in 2025, after years of denying the accusation, and before that with the pro-government GATIA and MSA militias in 2022, to blunt the Islamic State's advance around Ménaka. The same logic decides whether a truce with a state like Benin counts as prudence or betrayal, and how far a group will go against a population that refuses it.

What the doctrine does not decide is where any particular group ends up. The same creed produced an absolutist group in the Sahel and a group engaged in local governance in Nigeria. It sets the range of permissible positions; the men in charge choose within it, and the range is wide.

Why it matters

Three things follow. The Sahel states have benefited from the infighting, but two insurgencies bleeding each other is not really a counterinsurgency strategy: both groups have grown through every year of it. The traffic between the groups runs both ways, and each pays for its position. JNIM's pragmatism costs it purists like Sadou, while the Islamic State's refusal of any accommodation leaves it fighting every other armed actor in the region simultaneously, with no one to fall back on. And the doctrinal map shows which of these movements can conceivably be negotiated with and which cannot.

JNIM has already dealt with Benin and Côte d'Ivoire, with village councils across central Mali, and with a secular separatist movement in the north. Whatever else those arrangements are, they establish that the group can be talked to. That is the opening any future Malian government, or the coastal states now facing expansion toward them, would have to work with. The Islamic State offers no such opening, and there is no reason to expect one.

The precedents suggest what that might look like. Were JNIM ever to take a country outright, the pattern from Syria and Afghanistan points in two directions at once. Internally, the hardliners within it would find the new government's approach too moderate and defect to the Islamic State, producing an insurgency by rival jihadists against the victors. Externally, a movement in power acquires an interest in suppressing its rivals: post-Assad Syria joined the international coalition against the Islamic State, and the Taliban now cooperate with Washington, Beijing and Moscow against Islamic State networks in Central Asia. By that logic, a JNIM that governed Mali could end up a partner of convenience against the Islamic State's expansion, however unpalatable the prospect looks from outside the region.