ISIS and al-Qaeda are at War in the Sahel

In early September this year, the Islamic State Sahel Province, or ISSP, announced that it had won a major victory against one of its major rivals, Janim, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group that is active in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

According to the announcement, which was made in the Islamic State's global newsletter, Al-Nabar, the ISSP inflicted heavy losses on Janim during a battle in Kacham in the northern edges of Burkina Faso. They claimed to have killed more than 200 Janim fighters, wounded dozens, and captured vast quantities of weapons and motorcycles.

The ISSP also captured and subsequently executed more than 30 Janim fighters, including two Janim commanders. Now, we obviously have to take these numbers with a grain of salt, because they were reported by, yes, the Islamic State's newsletter. However, if they are true, then that would make this the deadliest confrontation yet between the two groups.

It would also make this one of the most significant losses for Janim in recent memory. Given what we know about the Sahel, it's only a matter of context. What time before Janim launches its own attack to retaliate for these losses?

The next salvo in the fratricidal war between these two organizations? One that might just tear the Sahel apart? BROTHERS IN ARMS When Janim was formed in 2017, its founders wanted a monopoly on jihadism within their territory, and that meant that no other group could be allowed to operate in the same area.

The first test of this philosophy was Ansar al-Islam, a jihadi group that had been formed in 2016 by Ibrahim Malam. A jihadist figure with ties to one of the organizations that had merged into Janim. Ansar al-Islam would operate in northern Burkina Faso's Som region, an area bordering Mali, close to where Janim was operating.

In 2017, Janim began a campaign in Som where they targeted positions held by Ansar al-Islam before expanding into the rest of the country. The two sides fought for several months before Janim's death, and multiple battle losses allowed Janim to gain full control of the group, but not every member of Ansar al-Islam joined Janim.

Others joined the Islamic State.

Now, given the intro that you just heard, you might be expecting this to be the part of the story where things get spicy between the two groups. Yet at first, that wasn't the case.

Although both Janim and the ISSP, who at the time operated under a different name, had sworn their allegiance to rival insurgent groups, they cooperated in multiple areas, sharing intelligence through go-betweens and, in several recorded cases, fighting side-by-side against their common enemies.

Between 2017 and 2019, the two groups carried out a string of joint operations, including an attack on UN and Malian troops in northeastern Mali, an ambush in southwestern Niger that led to the deaths of around 30 troops, and a large-scale raid on a military outpost in northern Burkina Faso.

Regional observers dubbed this cooperation the Sahelian Anomaly, also called the Sahelian Exception, because nowhere else in the world did al-Qaeda and the Islamic State coexist so peacefully. The Taliban and Islamic State Khorasan were killing each other in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The Islamic State were doing the same in Yemen, and so were al-Shabaab and the Islamic State small faction in Somalia, and so on. The Sahel was the only exception. This isn't to say that the two groups were constantly singing Kumbaya over a shared campfire while trading heartwarming stories about all the infidels they'd killed.

The two groups did have occasional disagreements, but according to researchers Heni and Sabir and Caleb Weiss, they were usually resolved before coming to blows, which, just to emphasize, was almost unheard of.

Which raises an obvious question: why were they so close, especially with all the bad blood between the various al-Qaeda and Islamic State aligned groups? The answer, according to Enzaaba and Weiss, lies in the history of these two specific offshoots.

Some of the senior members had worked together as part of other insurgency groups and maintained close ties with each other, despite joining different factions. These ties didn't just stop at the leadership level: they also embedded local liaison officers to ensure that the cooperation was maintained. The cooperation between them was as smooth as possible.

These liaison officers organized meetings and the exchange of information between the two sides. This, coupled with the fact that both groups had shared enemies, allowed them to develop strong ties. Now, we have to emphasize the fact that there was never a grand alliance between the two.

It was a pragmatic working arrangement between two groups whose leaders had a shared history. Their goodwill, quite obviously, didn't last forever. Although the two groups cooperated and were openly cordial with each other, tensions were bubbling away beneath the surface.

Tensions which would finally erupt into the fratricidal war currently consuming the Sahel. FRATRICIDAL WARS The war between the two insurgent groups began in July 2019 after a firefight in Ariel village along the border with Bekirafasu and Mali. There were more clashes between 2019 and 2020, including firefights in Mali and even as far as Mauritania.

Despite these clashes, it was not until a May 2020 issue of the Al Naba newsletter that either side openly acknowledged the violence. In the newsletter, the ISSP claimed that the fighters had pushed back multiple attacks in central Mali carried out by Janim.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda is telling a different version of the events through their Telegram channels where they claimed that Janim had actually managed to defeat ISSP in some of those battles.

According to the conflict monitoring group Akhled, there have been more than 320 clashes between the two groups since the fighting began in 2019, which have resulted in the deaths of more than 2,200 fighters on both sides. Much of this fighting has been concentrated. In Mali and Bekirafasu.

But since April this year, it has spread to Niger's Tiliberi and Doso regions and Nigeria's Kebi state. Before Kacham, the single deadliest clash happened in December 2022, when the two sides clashed in Mali's Gao region, where more than 173 fighters were killed. So we have to ask, what turned these two former allies into enemies?

The most obvious answer is territory. Both groups expanded fast through the late 2010s and into the 2020s, and their zones now overlap across huge stretches of the Sahel. This overlapping territory covers pastureland, mining sites, hunting reserves, and smuggling routes, and there is only so much of it to go around.

And for groups that depend on controlling this territory for their income, it was only a matter of time before they started stepping on each other's toes. And then there's manpower, a scarce resource because there are only so many people who are willing to throw their lives into the meat grinder in pursuit of religious fundamentalist ideas.

The two groups have been competing over manpower since they were formed, and there have been multiple instances.

One of them is that of Sharia Law, which is considered to have been the most powerful force in the Middle East. The other is that of the Sardinians, which is considered to be the most powerful force in the Middle East. And the other is that of the Sardinians, which is considered to have been the most powerful force in the Middle East.

And the other is that of the Sardinians, which is considered to have been the most powerful force in the Middle East. And the other is that of the Sardinians, which is considered to have been the most powerful force in the Middle East. And the other is that of the Sardinians, which is considered to have been the most powerful force in the Middle East.

The most significant of these happened in February this year, when Sardar Samholna, also known as Arnifa, Janim's emir for Niger. Sard released two audio recordings after his defection, where he laid out his reasons for leaving Janim. He accused Janim's leadership of never fully applying Sharia law, despite years of him pushing them to do so.

He also rejected the idea that ISSP fighters were heretics, which is what Janim's own propaganda had been calling them for months, adding that the Islamic State's actions matched its words in a way Janim's no longer did.

This is the kind of accusation that can sink the credibility of any jihadist group, especially when it comes from someone as high-placed as Sard.

Sard further claimed that his own superiors had ordered him to negotiate non-aggression deals with the governments of Benin and Ivory Coast, arrangements which he saw as a betrayal of everything the movement was supposed to stand for.

For their part, Janim accused Sard of leaving the organization because he wanted a bigger share of the loot. Now, we obviously don't know which version of this is true, and to be honest, for our purposes today, it doesn't really matter.

The end result was the same: Sardau left Janim and publicly levelled accusations against the group that contained its credibility, which Janim couldn't allow to go unpunished.

According to multiple reports, Janim fighters infiltrated the Islamic State's ranks by posing as new recruits, who were then assigned to Sard's unit. They remained with Sard for a couple of weeks before assassinating him near the border between Burkina Faso and Niger.

This attack served three purposes: it punished the defector who had been disparaging Janim's name; it sent a message to anyone within Janim's ranks who was considering defecting to the other side that if they did they would be punished for it; and Janim sent a message to the Islamic State that they would not tolerate any attempts at talent poaching.

Janim even followed up this assassination with an attack where they killed the Islamic State's Emir of North-East Burkina Faso. While Sardau's death closed the chapter opened by his defection, it highlighted one of the biggest differences between the ISSP and Janim: ideology. According to Heni N.

Sabir and Caleb Weiss, the ISSP favoured a quick and often heavy-handed approach in their implementation of Sharia law, while Janim favoured a slower and more calculated approach.

The Islamic State's commanders have also accused Janim of being too willing to cut deals, whether with rival militias inside Mali or, as Sabaholna claimed, entire governments along the West African coast. To ISSP, a jihadist group that negotiates with the states it's supposedly fighting is a jihadist group that is decadent and weak.

This difference in ideology is perhaps the biggest issue between the two groups. Because, at their core, they are both religious fundamentalist groups that want to impose their own version of Sharia law. Any group that is not in line with their specific interpretation will be automatically branded an enemy, despite any historical ties between them.

Finally, we should discuss the influence that ISC played in pushing the ISSP into fighting Janim. In 2019, ISC began exerting greater control over the ISSP, who at the time were operating under a different name.

Nasaib-e-Ur reported that: "The Islamic State cell was created along the border between Mali and Nigeria, which seemed to be an attempt by ISC to establish operational oversight by using this cell as middle management." And, Jesus Christ, yes, apparently even jihadist groups cannot escape middle management.

After ISC had established control over ISSP, it began to push the latter to adopt a more confrontational approach towards Janim, similar to the approach other Islamic State affiliates were taking with al-Qaeda affiliates in the areas they operated in.

Once all of these factors were put together, it was only a matter of time before the two insurgent groups began trading blows. And once that happened, revenge attacks became the order of the day.

Every attack that one group does invites retaliation from the other, locking them in a never-ending cycle. And every time there's a new attack, both groups lose manpower, weapons, and equipment, which weakens them just a little bit more.

Which raises an important question: can the Sahelian governments take advantage of these fratricidal wars to finally defeat the insurgent groups?

State Weakness Pavel Voychik, an independent researcher specializing in Sunni jihadist groups and a regular contributor to France.co, doesn't think the Sahelian governments are going to succeed in exploiting these fissures.

In an exclusive interview with our team, he pointed to Mali, where Janim has partnered with another insurgent group to attack Bamako and its Russian allies. That other group is the Azawad Liberation Front, or FLA, an ethno-nationalist Tareg militia whose main goal is securing an independent homeland.

According to Wassim Nassar, a senior research fellow at the Solfin Centre and journalist at France24, Janim and the FLA formed a partnership in 2025. As part of the deal, Janim and the FLA set up a joint mechanism to plan, run, and claim military operations against the Malian army and Russia's Afrika Korps.

The FLA also agreed to accept Sharia law in the areas that both groups controlled, even though their insurgency is avowedly not a religious one.

The two groups also set up de-confliction courts. The courts staffed with judges from both sides to resolve any issues that emerged between them. And they agreed to share technology and information, with the FLA gaining bomb-making expertise from Janim.

All of this has paid off. On the 25th of April, Janim and the FLA launched a coordinated assault targeting multiple positions held by the Malian government.

They captured the town of Kidal in northern Mali, killed the nation's defense minister Sadio Kamara, and forced the Malian army and troops from Russia's Afrika Korps to abandon a string of locations in the north of the country.

Janim had re-imposed a blockade of the capital Bamako, burning vehicles that attempted to leave or enter the city. In July, the two groups launched a second wave of coordinated strikes, hitting more locations including Kanaroba prison, where the Malian government reportedly holds members of the political opposition.

While the Islamic State was not involved in the planning or coordination of these attacks, they did take full advantage of them.

During the first wave of coordinated attacks, as Malian and Russian forces were pulling out of Labizanga, on the border between Mali and Niger, they were ambushed by Islamic State militants who eventually overran the town. The Islamic State also massed forces around the town of Menaka before withdrawing following intense military pressure from the Russians.

These attacks proved that even if the two groups are technically enemies, the Islamic State is extremely willing to use any opportunities created by Janim to further its own goals.

Bamako, on the other hand, is often left scrambling, trying to fight off attacks on multiple fronts at the same time, which stretches its already overstretched military even further. And while the coordinated attacks are only happening in Mali, that doesn't mean that the other Sahelian states are having an easy time handling their own jihadist crises.

In January this year, Islamic State fighters attacked Niamey's International Airport and the adjoining airbase, which was home to a contingent of Russia's Afrika Korps, destroying several aircraft in the process.

Two months later, they attacked a military drone base at the Tahala airport in the southwestern part of Niger. In May, the ISSP confirmed, through the Al-Nabar Newsletter, that it was actually an attack in the northeastern part of Nigeria. The group took credit for attacks in Sokoto and Kebi states that had happened months prior.

The ISSP had deliberately chosen not to take responsibility for these strikes when they occurred in order to keep their advances into that part of Nigeria a secret. Janim has been just as busy launching a region-wide offensive across the central Sahel and into Benin in early February this year.

According to Akhled, this year is on track to be Benin's deadliest on record, mainly because of Janim's activities.

The ISSP has targeted the Niamey International Airport, the same one that the Islamic State had targeted months earlier, and they've also targeted Burkina Faso in multiple small-scale incidents this year. Now, none of this would be happening if the Sahelian states were not so weak.

Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger are all run by military hunters which seize power promising to, among other things, fix the security crises plaguing their nations.

Instead, the situation's only gotten worse under their rule. Things have gotten so bad that soldiers serving on the frontlines in Niger recently attempted to fight the government in Niamey. While they were ultimately unsuccessful, the fact that they even tried is a testament to just how unhappy the rank-and-file soldiers are with their country's leadership.

What makes matters worse is that none of these states seem to have a plan in place to deal with the insurgent groups, or to even take advantage of the openings created by the infighting between the various jihadist groups. All three nations kicked out their Western security guarantors, usually America and France, and replaced them with the Russians.

They're the only ones left in the Middle East who really care about what's going on.

They've allegedly been very effective as a praetorian guard to keep the regime safe from coup plotters, but woefully ineffective at anything else. Add in the fact that these nations rarely care about what happens in the far reaches of their territory, the kind of areas where these insurgent groups thrive, and you have a potent recipe for disaster.

To their credit, these nations did come together to create the unified force of the Alliance to combat the insurgents that would be staffed with 15,000 troops mobilized from the three nations.

On paper, sounds like exactly the kind of force that the Sahel needs, but the key words there are, of course, on paper.

If this force doesn't receive the kind of support it needs - proper equipment, enough manpower, and sufficient intelligence sharing - then it will suffer the same fate as all the other forces fighting the insurgents, constantly playing catch-up against insurgent groups that have the initiative. Unless things change.

This will end up as a place where the only groups left standing are Jannim and the Islamic State, battling over the corpse of the region. Thank you for watching.