Acled data and analyst framings locate Sahel violence in local drivers, not global jihad

Summary

Acled data record a roughly forty-five-fold rise in Sahel jihadist incidents from 2016 to 2025 while global terrorism deaths have fallen to their lowest since 2008, supporting a place-specific-drivers framing over global jihad expansion.
Ulf Laessing of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Acled’s Peter Bofin describe Sahelian and East African affiliates as locally rooted, while the UN report characterizes al-Qaida’s central leadership as “marginalised” with external-operations capability “unclear.”
JNIM and the Azawad Liberation Front’s April 2026 offensive — using ambushes, car bombs, drones, and raids to retake Kidal and kill Mali’s defence minister — registers as tactical sophistication that strains a “localised” reading’s predictive scope.
Acled’s clustering of violence in areas of thin state presence, the documented Tuareg cross-border mobility that the FLA-JNIM alliance embodies, and the porous colonial borders the groups exploit situate the trajectory in place-based dynamics neither global-jihad nor purely local framings fully capture.

The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Acled, recorded 2,145 events involving jihadist groups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger through mid-September 2026, putting the year on pace to exceed the 2,845 events logged in 2025 and the 63 events recorded a decade earlier. The figures were published as the United States marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and they coincide with the 2026 Global Peace Index reporting that “Terrorism has become more geographically concentrated: the Sahel continued to record some of the world’s highest terrorism death tolls, with the UN recording more than 9,000 deaths from security incidents across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in 2025.” Three analytical frames — global jihad expansion, localised insurgency, and contested territory — now compete to explain the trajectory, and the evidence accumulates most heavily on place-based dynamics operating beneath a residual global-jihad brand.

How this is being framed

The substrate reports the same Sahelian trajectory through three competing readings, each foregrounding a different causal mechanism.

The first reading treats Sahelian violence as the latest theater of al-Qaida’s post-9/11 project, with central command disrupted but brand reach extending through affiliates. The substrate cites a recent UN report describing al-Qaida’s senior leadership as “marginalised” and noting that “the group’s capability and intent to conduct external operations remained ‘unclear.’” Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in Kabul by the US in 2022, no formal successor has been declared, and the de facto leader is believed to be Saif al-Adel, who is thought to have been in Iran since 2002 and has yet to make any public statement. The same UN report described Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as “the vanguard of the global al-Qaida movement,” and in May AQAP’s media channels released a video calling on Muslims in Europe and the US to “carry out local attacks and to fight on ‘behalf of the [Islamic community] in any way possible.’” The frame treats African gains as strategically significant regardless of local drivers and underwrites continued Western counterterrorism coordination.

The second reading treats the Sahel’s groups as “very localised” entities with “major limitations as a base for campaigns elsewhere or for long-range terrorist attacks.” Ulf Laessing of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation frames the shift directly: “Twenty-five years ago it was all about Afghanistan and then Iraq … Africa wasn’t really of interest then. Now it’s the main area of operations,” and adds that “Not a single attack in Europe or the US has been planned in the Sahel.” The substrate supplies a parallel East African data point: Acled recorded “more than 10,000 reported deaths in al-Shabaab-related violence over the past 18 months,” and Acled’s Peter Bofin reports that al-Shabaab’s revenue streams “stretch across the country, and the region,” even as the group’s “extortion in Mogadishu” has suffered “some degradation.” The localised-insurgency reading’s policy implications are governance, resource-conflict mediation, and locally legitimate security forces.

The third reading treats the violence as a function of state weakness and the displacement of one external military presence — French — by another, Russian auxiliaries, with the April JNIM-FLA offensive and the retaking of Kidal marking a reversal of junta gains recorded three years earlier. The auxiliary replacement has shifted the kinetic balance without addressing the underlying drivers; the JNIM-FLA success reflects a tactical adaptation rather than a strategic redirection. The substrate notes that “a force of Russian mercenaries surrendered” at Kidal after “soldiers fled,” and that JNIM operations continue “killing additional soldiers and Russian mercenaries in recent weeks and broadening its operations into some neighbouring countries.”

Who gains, who bears the costs

JNIM and the Azawad Liberation Front registered the most concrete gains in the period covered. The April joint offensive targeted “strategic towns, government forces and their Russian auxiliaries” with “ambushes, car bombs, drones and raids,” inflicting significant casualties; the operation killed Mali’s defence minister in a suicide attack on his residence in the garrison town of Kati, “nine miles north-west of the capital, Bamako,” and killed the head of military intelligence. The campaign retook the strategic city of Kidal, “a former stronghold of the FLA,” reversing “a key symbolic victory won by the junta in Mali three years ago.” Since then, Acled reports, JNIM has continued to expand the territory under its control.

JNIM in Burkina Faso claimed “more than 130 attacks in 2026,” striking closer to the capital, Ouagadougou. In Niger, the group claimed at least 17 attacks, remaining “significantly less active than its rival, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.” The al-Qaida brand registered a propaganda gain: African expansion “has been welcomed in al-Qaida propaganda.” AQAP, described by the UN report as “the vanguard of the global al-Qaida movement,” continues to maintain “an estimated 2,000 fighters, largely entrenched in the mountains between Abyan and Shabwa.”

The cost side is dominated by civilians and Sahelian state forces. The UN recorded “more than 9,000 deaths from security incidents across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in 2025,” and “Much of the violence across the three countries involves fighting with rival groups; the conflict has also included multiple killings by government armed forces and Russian mercenaries.” In East Africa, Acled recorded “more than 10,000 reported deaths in al-Shabaab-related violence over the past 18 months.” The non-African al-Qaida affiliate that retains the most explicit external-operations mandate registered the sharpest activity decline: AQAP’s events fell by approximately 70 percent, “from 63 events in the first seven months of 2025 to 19 during the same period in 2026.”

What happens next

The trajectory of operational sophistication visible in the April offensive does not exclude future reorientation. The roughly forty-five-fold increase in recorded events from 2016 to 2025, combined with the documented use of “ambushes, car bombs, drones and raids” against fortified positions, indicates capabilities the substrate does not attribute to a single central command but that could in principle be redirected under conditions not yet present.

The AQAP trajectory illustrates how an external-operations mandate can persist through a steep activity decline. The affiliate’s seventy-percent drop in events occurred in the same window as its May video calling on Muslims in Europe and the US to carry out local attacks. The substrate records the continuing “estimated 2,000 fighters, largely entrenched in the mountains between Abyan and Shabwa.” A reader attentive to that contraction and the continuing call to action would not infer safety from the activity decline.

The Russian mercenary presence functions as a parallel sovereignty that JNIM exploits as a target while shaping Bamako’s domestic political calculation in the wake of the Kidal reversal; both effects fall outside the dichotomous frame choice the substrate invites. The auxiliary-mercenary model has produced tactical setbacks — Mali’s defence minister and head of military intelligence killed, Kidal retaken, Russian forces surrendering — without addressing the governance and resource drivers the substrate itself identifies.

The contrast between Sahelian record violence and the global downward trend in terrorism deaths points to a decoupling the substrate documents but does not explain mechanically. The 2026 Global Peace Index records “Terrorism has become more geographically concentrated: the Sahel continued to record some of the world’s highest terrorism death tolls.” Some analysts have contrasted the high numbers of militants currently mobilised by groups such as JNIM and al-Shabaab, “which number in the tens of thousands, with the much more limited manpower available to al-Qaida before the 9/11 attacks.”

The place itself: prospect, refuge, and porous borders

The place-based reading draws on the British geographer Jay Appleton’s prospect-refuge theory, set out in The Experience of Landscape (1975), and on Christian Norberg-Schulz’s reading of genius loci. Acled’s data document violence clustering in areas where state presence is thin, a finding consistent with what Appleton’s framework predicts — populations concentrate where the affordances of prospect and refuge balance, and the absence of state refuge pushes that calculation toward informal protection arrangements.

The Sahel as a spatial gestalt concentrates state authority in a few legible nodes — Bamako, Ouagadougou, Kati, Kidal — while the surrounding territory functions, in Appleton’s terms, as prospect for armed actors who can move through it, refuge from the enclaves that remain nominally sovereign, and a hazard zone for any external force attempting to hold terrain. Kidal itself — described as “a former stronghold of the FLA” whose earlier seizure had rendered it “a key symbolic victory” for the junta — reads as an intimate space of contested sovereignty that has changed hands.

Inhabitant variation shapes the affordance calculation. For Tuareg populations whose mobility is the basis of their political economy, the prospect-refuge calculation includes the ability to withdraw across borders that the state cannot close. For sedentary agricultural populations, the calculation includes fixed-plot defence that jihadist groups can target with car bombs and drones, as the Mali airport and Kati garrison attacks demonstrate. For Russian auxiliaries operating in unfamiliar terrain with limited local-language capacity, the place’s affordances are inverted: their prospect is high through satellite imagery and drones, but their refuge is low because no embedded local networks exist — a structural inversion the substrate’s reporting on Russian forces surrendering at Kidal makes concrete.

From a Norberg-Schulz-inflected reading, the genius loci of the Sahelian interior — the natural place of the savanna, the river systems, the seasonal mobility patterns — does not match the genius loci that the modern state attempts to overlay; the place’s identification dimension operates at the scale of clan, ethnic community, and trade network, while the state-level genius loci is a thin overlay whose failure to support dwelling is precisely what produces the conditions for insurgent recruitment. The Tuareg-dominated FLA joining with JNIM is consistent with this reading: the joining is an alliance between populations whose dwelling-scale identity differs from the state-level one. Christopher Alexander’s pattern-language framework, set out in A Pattern Language (1977) and The Timeless Way of Building (1979), reads the substrate’s reference to JNIM’s continued expansion through the necessity of fitting human activity patterns to environmental structure rather than to the international counterterrorism calendar.

What the framings obscure

Each of the three readings carries an analytical cost. The global-jihad frame tends to obscure local drivers: governance failures, Russian-mercenary entanglement in Mali, resource competition, and JNIM territorial dynamics — the April offensive’s killing of Mali’s defence minister at his residence in the garrison town of Kati, “nine miles north-west of the capital, Bamako,” and the seizure of the strategic city of Kidal after “soldiers fled” are concrete incidents the global-jihad reading absorbs into a brand narrative rather than explains.

The localised-insurgency frame tends to obscure the residual propaganda and tactical-influence channel the global al-Qaida network still represents, and the evolutionary risk that groups classified as “localised” can reorient under conditions not yet present. The substrate’s reference to al-Qaida propaganda welcoming the African expansion keeps the symbolic dimension live, and the UN report’s separate characterisation of AQAP as “the vanguard of the global al-Qaida movement” preserves the cross-border operational concern even as activity declines.

The contested-territory frame is largely silent on the broader endogenous drivers the localised-conflict reading foregrounds. The substrate’s framing of al-Shabaab — territorial entrenchment, autonomous revenue, geographically contained operations — closely parallels what the same substrate reports of JNIM, with both groups operating autonomously from a central al-Qaida command structure.

Implications for different audiences

For the European counterterrorism community, the localised-conflict reading predicts that Sahelian violence will not translate into European attacks, and the available evidence supports that prediction. AQAP, the group the UN report itself characterises as “the vanguard of the global al-Qaida movement,” has seen activity fall by approximately 70 percent from 2025 to 2026, and the same UN report described al-Qaida’s senior leadership as “marginalised” with “the group’s capability and intent to conduct external operations” remaining “unclear.”

For African Union policymakers and Sahelian juntas, the auxiliary-mercenary model has produced tactical setbacks without addressing the governance and resource drivers the substrate itself identifies, leaving open whether the displacement of one external military presence by another addresses underlying instability or reproduces it. The substrate notes that the displacement of French forces by Russian auxiliaries preceded — and did not prevent — the April reversal.

For Western humanitarian audiences, the UN recorded more than 9,000 deaths from security incidents across the three Sahel countries in 2025, and “Much of the violence across the three countries involves fighting with rival groups; the conflict has also included multiple killings by government armed forces and Russian mercenaries.” A frame that treats the Sahel purely as a counterterrorism problem understates the civilian dimension the UN data captures.

The strongest defence the global-jihad reading will offer is that the localised-conflict reading is itself a category error: al-Qaida branding is not incidental, and the global-jihad infrastructure does transfer even if external operations have not yet materialised. The available evidence is mixed: the UN report’s “marginalised” characterisation weakens the global-jihad claim at the centre, but the substrate’s reference to al-Qaida propaganda welcoming the African expansion keeps the symbolic dimension live, and the UN report’s separate characterisation of AQAP as “the vanguard of the global al-Qaida movement” — together with AQAP’s May video calling on Muslims in Europe and the US to carry out local attacks — preserves the cross-border operational concern even as activity declines.

The substrate supports neither frame in its pure form. A defensible reading holds both: the Sahel’s groups are locally rooted in the specific governance failures the substrate identifies, and they remain linked to a global al-Qaida brand whose propaganda value, while diminished at the senior-leadership level where “the group’s capability and intent to conduct external operations remained ‘unclear,’” persists through affiliates willing to call for attacks abroad even as their own operations remain territorially confined. The place itself — porous at the seams and only intermittently governed — is what makes both characterizations simultaneously true, and what makes the violence trajectory decouple from the global downward trend in terrorism deaths reported elsewhere in the 2026 Global Peace Index.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Frame Comparison: Sets two or more competing frames side by side to see what each reveals and hides.
Genius Loci — Sense of Place: Reads the character and felt quality of a place.
Red-Team Advocate: Argues the adversary’s case in full to expose what a plan underrates.