Islamic militants are gaining major ground in Mali. The consequences for Africa are profound.
Corbis via Getty Images
It’s the most important story that most people aren’t watching.
Late last month, Islamist militants affiliated with Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), an al-Qaeda affiliate active in Africa’s lawless Sahel region, spearheaded a series of coordinated attacks across the nation of Mali. Over the span of two days, the group – working in tandem with ethnic Tuareg separatists – struck military targets in and around the capital, Bamako, hit the country’s international airport, seized the northern city of Kidal, and assassinated the country’s defense minister.
The offensive represented a dangerous escalation. JNIM already dominates vast stretches of territory across Mali and the broader Sahel, sustaining itself through drug trafficking, extortion, kidnappings for ransom, and fuel interdiction. It has openly proclaimed its ambition to establish an African caliphate. Until now, however, the group’s plan was to replicate the Taliban’s path back to power in Afghanistan, waiting out the existing government until it collapses from within. The April assaults suggest a turn toward more immediate, opportunistic bids for power.
Mali’s disorder is not an isolated flare up. It is part of a broader – and ominous – continental shift. With the collapse of the ISIS caliphate in Syria late last decade, the epicenter of global terrorism has shifted south and west. As the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University has documented, the continent of Africa has become the most active global theater in terms of terrorist activity. Insurgency hotspots now stretch from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in the west to Somalia and Mozambique in its east.
The JNIM advance is also a significant setback for Russia. Paramilitary forces from Russia’s notorious Wagner Group of mercenaries were brought in by the Malian junta back in 2022 to suppress the country’s ongoing Islamist insurgency. Those forces have remained in the country, albeit now with more direct control from the Kremlin (after Wagner’s bombastic chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led an abortive coup against Moscow and paid the ultimate price for it). Those forces, now rebranded the Africa Corps, have become increasingly important for regional governments in recent years, stepping into the vacuum left by retreating Western militaries.
Last month’s Islamist offensive, however, has laid bare the flimsiness of Moscow’s regional footprint. Hundreds of Africa Corps fighters were reportedly routed from Kidal, losing vital equipment and ground to advancing militants in an ignominious setback. Russia’s failure in Mali, moreover, is part of a broader pattern of setbacks for the Kremlin across Africa and the Middle East. Moscow has also lost ground in recent months in Libya, and its status in post-Assad Syria remains uncertain.
All of which has created the potential for a crisis of continental proportions. As analysts have noted, JNIM now stands a real shot of taking over and controlling Bamako. If it does, Mali would become the first country in history controlled by an al-Qaeda affiliate.
But the crisis is also an opportunity. As Zineb Riboua of the Hudson Institute argues, America now has an opening to step into the void left by Islamist advances and Russian underperformance and position itself as a serious security guarantor for vulnerable African states.
It’s far from clear, though, that it will. Just days after JNIM’s offensive in Mali, the Trump administration released its new counterterrorism strategy. That guidance acknowledges the problem, laying out that “today there are parts of Africa where a resurgent terror threat is the reality.” But its preferred solution is a decidedly minimalist one: a “light military footprint” and greater counterterrorism burden-sharing by partner nations in and around the continent.
Other strategic documents are similarly laissez faire. The Administration’s November 2025 National Security Strategy deals with Africa only minimally, and mostly in the context of making it an attractive investment hub. The Pentagon’s subsequent National Defense Strategy, released this past January, confines its discussion of Africa to the need “to prevent Islamic terrorists from using regional safe havens to strike the U.S. Homeland” and “empower[ing] allies and partners to lead efforts to degrade and destroy” others.
Given the scale and momentum of the threat, such restraint risks proving woefully inadequate. Without a coherent and proactive Africa strategy that treats the continent as a central theater rather than a peripheral concern, Mali’s Islamist chaos might turn out to be the opening chapter of a much larger story.