After France exit, Sahel states unite to tackle terror. Will it work?

Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are forging their own path after severing ties with ECOWAS, the regional bloc that has long been central to West Africa’s economic and security framework. Their departure signals a decisive rejection of external influences, including those of their former colonial ruler, France, and marks a shift towards greater self-reliance. Propelled by a shared ambition to reclaim control over their own gold, oil and sovereignty, the three states, led by military juntas, have embarked on a series of bold, rapid changes.

The shift was marked by a succession of military coups in all three countries since 2023, the subsequent booting out of French troops, an influx of Russian forces into the region, and finally a formal withdrawal from ECOWAS on January 29 2025.

The leaders of these countries say they are wresting back sovereignty over their territories and resources. While their citizens are buoyed by the flurry of anti-colonial activity, seeing their chance to reclaim their culture, decisions and future.

By casting off the yoke of France and ECOWAS, the Sahel states instead opted to strengthen their relationship with one another, creating a defence pact in September 2023. The Alliance of Sahel States (AES) mandates all three nations to provide mutual assistance in the event of an attack, somewhat similar to NATO’s Article 5.

“It is a good beginning for them to harmonise and to materialise their forces, but they need more than this,” Bakary Sambe, the regional director of the Senegalese-based Timbuktu Institute, tells TRT World.

Threat to territory

The urgency of such cooperation is evident. Several terror groups, some Al Qaeda affiliated, others allied with Daesh, have been engaged in a violent tug of war in the region. The dominant factions include Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wa al Muslimeen (JNIM), affiliated with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and Daesh’s Sahel Province (ISSP), formerly known as Daesh in the Greater Sahara.

These groups have intensified their attacks, gaining territory in the process. At least 3,470 people have been killed in the last six months and 2.6 million displaced in all three states, UN figures in December show. Terror and insurgent violence has been surging in Africa overall but particularly so in the Sahel region where in 2024, over half of extremist violence in the continent occurred.

Take Burkina Faso’s Barsologho massacre in August 2024, where civilians were recruited to dig trenches to ward off incoming JNIM attacks. The Justice Collective for Barsalogho, representing victims' families, say this exposed them to JNIM militants, who approached the civilians on motorbikes and gunned them down, killing hundreds.

Nearly a month later, in September, a small crew of JNIM terrorists used IEDs and kamikaze vehicles to attack Mali’s Modibo Keita International Airport outside the capital Bamako, mounting an Al Qaeda flag on the building.

On the same day, another small group launched an attack on the national gendarmerie academy, also in Bamako. The death toll is unclear, though international media put it between 50 to 70. The attacks on September 17 reveal how the Sahel militaries have been grappling with insufficient manpower and intelligence.

Neighbouring Mali suffered significant losses in its north in July during a three-day battle in Tinzaouten, where Tuareg-led separatists and other terrorist groups said they had killed 84 Wagner fighters and 47 Malian soldiers. ​​Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine's GUR military intelligence unit, was then quoted by state media as saying, “The rebels received all the necessary information they needed”.

Mali promptly cut off relations with Ukraine. Since then, Kiev has been accused of providing drones and support to Tuareg rebels in Mali, an allegation it has denied.

New playground of power

Nevertheless, the purported Ukraine-Russia influence in the Sahel has laid bare a new reality for the region.

“I think beyond all this problem between ECOWAS and AES, we can see also the risk of our region to…become more and more the new playground within this new big game between powers which are competing in our soil,” Sambe says.

Faced with such challenges, the AES has prioritised internal cooperation.

“It's something good for the region to harmonise their strategies,” Sambe tells TRT World. “But in the meantime, I think that they will need more capacity, if you know that just the Katiba Masina has more than 8,000 combatants.”

The Katiba Masina, allied with Ansar Dine, is one of many extremist armed groups that operate in Mali.

Ovigwe Eguegu, a policy analyst at Development Reimagined, an international development consultancy, tells TRT World that while the Sahel militaries are demonstrating resilience, they face significant structural issues.

“These are really armies with deep, deep challenges. And it tells us about weapons plus competency plus capabilities, but those capabilities would need strong defense and military partnerships to be built. And those capabilities take time to build, right?” Eguegu tells TRT World.

He continues: “Now, whether they have that much time is another thing because Already we can see that even the terrorist groups in the region are being bolstered day after day after day and they're able to carry out very crushing attacks.”

Complex problem

The Sahel also contends with ethnic Tuareg or Fulani separatists, who sometimes align with radical terror groups.

What, then, is the antidote to a complex problem, forged out of decades of mistreatment of ethnic groups, a simmering extremist insurgency and the failure of various civilian governments to combat them without outside help?

For the military leaders of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, the answer lies in enhanced security cooperation. The AES plans to deploy a 5,000-strong joint force across AES territory, which would be furnished with its own air assets, equipment, and intelligence resources.

The countries have also been shoring up their civilian fighting force by recruiting youth.

“Turning the young people in fighting age into soldiers requires a lot of training, requires resources. Burkina Faso has made a lot of progress in this regard with mobilising its volunteer corps and youth to form a volunteer corps,” Eguegu says.

Juntas have also been backing various armed groups allied with the state to help fight these armed groups.

The trinity has also turned elsewhere, away from the West and its regional neighbours for help. They recruited the help of Russian troops from Africa Corps, the group under the leadership of Moscow that took control of Russia’s operations in Africa after the collapse of Wagner.

Underpinning the manpower reinforcements, are the supply of Turkish Bayraktar-TB2 and Akinci drones along with Chinese commercial drones. Mali has also inked deals with Chinese firm Norinco to receive military equipment, training, and technology transfers.

But will it work?

The feasibility of the alliance

The departure from ECOWAS – who has sanctioned the trinity – has left the states in a blind spot, particularly in terms of intelligence-sharing with neighbouring countries.

“So these three countries being the centre of it means they've always needed support from surrounding countries, particularly coastal countries in tracking weapons flow, in tracking financial flow. So that kind of intelligence sharing has been a major, major part beyond even the fighting and kinetic part of the security cooperation,” Ovigwe says.

Analysts say they pulled out too abruptly rather than strategically, leaving their economies and military with a thin cushion to fall back on. Experts caution that the ECOWAS pullout won’t necessarily bolster security in the region, what with the influx of Russian troops.

“If they continue to isolate themselves inside the AES, it means that there is a huge Russian presence in the middle of ECOWAS space. And what we have to know is that even, we cannot have full security if we have space of insecurity inside the space,” Bakary says.

On top of that, these insurgencies have been spilling over into West Africa’s coastal countries, like Benin and the Cote d'Ivoire, a region which in 2024 suffered from more than 500 extremist events within 50km of their borders.

“We have never been in a situation when we see a real risk of confrontation between countries, conflicts of interstate countries, conflicts, like now when we see the escalation in the discourse between Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso, between Niger and Benin,” Bakary tells TRT World.

At the end, to see whether the new unified troop division, international partnerships, the weapons and youth recruitment could stave off the advance of terror groups and militias, one would have to be patient.