For the past year, an al-Qaeda affiliate has been strangling the capital of a West African nation by burning fuel trucks, blockading roads, and imposing sharia law on captured towns, without striking a Western or Israeli target. Since September 2025, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s Sahelian affiliate, has waged an economic siege of Bamako, Mali’s capital.
In April 2026, JNIM and an allied Tuareg separatist group launched an offensive that killed Mali’s defense minister and seized or contested several cities, including Kidal, Gao, Mopti, and Sévaré, bringing fighters within reach of Bamako, the country’s capital.
In towns it controls, such as Farabougou, JNIM has imposed sharia law, banned secular music, and required women to cover their heads. Its strategy mirrors the approach used by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria before each group toppled the government and seized power.
If JNIM or its ISIS-affiliated rival, the Islamic State Sahel Province, captured Bamako, it would be the first time a group with current, direct ties to al-Qaeda controlled a national capital.
This makes Mali the clearest test of near-enemy jihadist strategy in the world today. JNIM’s campaign is aimed at toppling Mali’s military government, the definitional near enemy in jihadist doctrine, rather than attacking the United States, Europe, or Israel.
Mali illustrates a decades-old debate that shapes jihadist strategy across theaters and organizations: which enemy should be fought first, the government ruling over Muslims or the outside powers backing it. The distinction between the “near enemy” (al-‘adaw al-qarib) and the “far enemy” (al-‘adaw al-ba’id) predates every group that uses it today. Understanding this hierarchy explains why movements calling for a global caliphate spend most of their resources fighting other Muslims and Muslim governments rather than the West or Israel.
At its territorial peak in early 2015, the Islamic State controlled roughly 41,000 square miles across Iraq and Syria, an area comparable to Portugal, and ruled as many as eight million people.
Hellbound and Down 