The JNIM branch of al-Qaeda

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0:08Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

0:41So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

0:57It's a name you might not be familiar with, but right now it's one of the deadliest jihadist groups in the world. The scale of the increase in attacks in Burkina Faso and the Sahel region across the board has been frightening. One of the most audacious was an attack on an airport near Mali's capital last year, rattling the ruling junta. This isn't one homogenous entity. It's a kaleidoscopic coalition, just like the region itself. Multiple different entities consisting of different tribes with very distinct leaders in different countries. And its leaders don't fit the mould of textbook jihadists.

1:46Iyad Ghali walked into an embassy, spoke with American diplomats, and they described him as a quietly spoken, reserved, slightly tired-looking man. Not quite the kind of aggressive, finger-pointing version of the jihadist that we maybe have in our minds. Their message has a lure in a region that's been beleaguered by military coups, ethnic conflict and climate change. Engaging with local people by portraying themselves as we are your protectors, the state are the enemy, the state are killing you, we are protecting you. Sub-Saharan Africa has become a key battleground for jihadists. In this episode, we put the global jigsaw spotlight on a group called JINIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate that has firmly planted its flag in the Sahel region.

2:34We'll try to understand who they are, where they came from and what they are fighting for. In part two, we'll explore the story from the local perspective.

2:48Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Krasi Ivanova-Twig, and this is the global jigsaw from BBC Monitoring, where we look at the world through the lens of its media, exploring the narratives, the propaganda and the disinformation.

3:09on the territory of Ukraine. Western countries are not the international community. That era has finished.

3:21JANIM may not be the best-known jihadist group, but its attacks have become a constant feature in the Sahel. Al-Qaeda's regional proxy, JNIM, has...

3:41The Sahel is a huge stretch of the middle belt of Africa, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Sudan and Chad. A big part of it is desert, and it's inhabited mostly by pastoral and farming communities who over the last decades have been threatened by Islamist extremists. Our guides to this story are two jihadist media analysts from BBC Monitoring. Barry Marston gives us the size of the problem. Around 50 % of deaths from terrorism in 2024 were in the Sahel region alone, and 25 % of those worldwide attacks were just for the country, Burkina Faso. Those figures come from the Global Terrorism Index, compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

4:31Gynim's story started in Mali, a country so vast you could fit Western Europe into it. We've been seeing this steady year-on-year increase in activity by Gynim. They were a group that firstly were very, very active in the centre of Mali, almost exclusively so, but then inexorably year after year, expanding north, expanding south throughout Mali itself, into Niger and Burkina Faso to really being the lion's share as of 2025. Videos broadcast by the JNIM showed terrorists strolling around and firing randomly into the windows of the presidential hangar. This is Jinim briefly taking over Bamako Airport and a few quarters of the city last September.

5:17And you see experts talking about perhaps around 40 % of territory in Burkina Faso alone is nominally in the hands of Jinim and other jihadist entities, gradually growing areas that really aren't in the hands of the central state authorities anymore in any meaningful way. Jinim have shown a remarkable ability not just to stage attacks but to hold territory. They control large areas where they are the de facto landlords. And over the past year or or Benin has really entered the fray. Over the last few months, a number of really big attacks, killing dozens of soldiers on a number of occasions. So really significant penetration much more widely across the region.

6:06So we sized up the problem. Now let's go back to the basics. What exactly is Jinnim again? Jacob Boswell picks up the thread. Jinnim is al-Qaeda's branch in the Sahel and the name is an acronym. It stands for Jamaat Nasrat Al-Islamu al-Muslimin, which means the group for the support of Islam and Muslims. Jinnum itself actually came into being in 2017, and it was a coalition of multiple jihadist groups across the region that sort of came together. Mali's main jihadist group said they have merged with two other groups linked with al-Qaeda. Iyad Aggali, leader of Ansuddin, joined with Al-Murabitoun.

6:46And when we see claims from Jinnim, we see it just as Jinnim. But in fact, this group is still multiple different entities consisting of different tribes with very distinct leaders in different countries. What do they say is their aim? This narrative of advocating an Islamic state or the global jihadist narrative has worked very well for them to date. even across those tribal linguistic and geographic divides, this same agenda of coming to power transnationally, bringing to bear Sharia governance and their own ideological beliefs about how Muslims in those areas should practice. They actively will go out to communities under their influence and seek to impose Islamic punishments and a level of Islamist governance.

7:40To discover the origins of what we now call Jinnim, we need to travel north and back in time, Algeria in the 90s. Those of us who've been around a couple of decades looking into jihadist trends, one of the big epicentres was Algeria for a very long time. Certainly through the 90s and into the early 2000s, we very rarely see attacks in Algeria these days. But many of the key jihadist figures moved down to the south into the Sahel and the Sahara region, became active in fueling some of the insurgencies we've seen since then. So the Maghreb North Africa arena has quietened down remarkably, but it's moved into the Sahel region, very notably those three states, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

8:31though. The region has often been called the coup belt because of frequent military takeovers in the last few years. And often the reason given by the military at any one point for these coups, they were saying that the current government isn't doing enough to fight jihadism and we can do a much better job.

8:54But in fact, many people on the ground would argue the opposite. This sort of plague of coups over this period has weakened these countries further. Military coups, weak governance and jihadism have the habit of feeding off each other and it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Jinnim made itself at home in Mali, a former French colony that had been in a prolonged turmoil. In the 2010s, there was a decade of extreme turbulence in Mali especially. There was the Tuareg rebellion in 2012. Jihadists kind of profited from this instability. And then there were a series of foreign interventions by France and other nations.

9:36And in 2017, it was five local jihadist groups which came together under the umbrella of Jinnim. So we should understand Jinnim as a kind of coalition group. This is key to understand Jinnim, its aim and methods. It's a coalition group and its eclectic nature is what sets it apart from the more single-minded model of a jihadist group. I think if it was one centralised entity trying to control all of that territory, it would be struggling because we're talking about a multi-tribal region. It's very difficult for one tribe to project its influence across others, particularly the Tuareg in the north of Mali.

10:15You've got the Fulani across much of Mali and into Burkina Faso. and then a whole range of different tribes in Burkina Faso and southern Mali itself. So the ability to project influence across that very diverse region is very much hinged on the ability to work across different tribes, but maintain that sort of quite local identity in any one region. France, the former colonial master, has led two counter-terrorism campaigns in Mali, Operation Serval and Barkan. and it withdrew its forces by the end of 2022. The UN stabilization force, called MINUSMA II, was asked to leave the country a year later.

11:00In Mali in particular, the coup was contextualized as a move away from France, away from the West, but we're going to embrace Russia.

11:13If Wagner went to liberate Syria, if Wagner went to liberate the Central African Republic, then we welcome Wagner to Bamako to liberate Mali. To the asymmetric war, we propose an asymmetric solution, which is Wagner. Wagner forces came in and, for example, during the second half of 2023, we were watching as base by base across northern Mali was being evacuated by the UN, you'd see this upsurge in claimed activity by Jinim, by northern insurgents and separatists. It was sort of inviting a new phase of activity by these groups. There was that level of instability, but also Wagner and local forces themselves became quite quickly embroiled in claims of very systematic human rights violations.

12:09Wagner became a magnet for jihadists here, who used the Russian mercenaries' reputation for cruelty to justify their fight. And the interesting thing was that Jinim itself tried to paint itself as the good guy in this situation. It was putting out statement after statement and videos decrying human rights abuses by the various governments, by Wagner, by local paramilitary forces, and saying they're the ones perpetrating these abuses, we are there to protect local people. The reality is that abuses have been committed by all sides, militaries, foreign mercenaries and jihadists. Groups like ACLET, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have regularly provided data on human rights violations.

13:01In Burkina Faso in 2023 alone, More than 8 ,000 people lost their lives. And we actually have seen one recent message from JINIM praising Human Rights Watch, a Western institution, for documenting what it called a massacre in Burkina Faso, the Silenzo Massacre. This kind of praise of Western institutions from JINIM, it's really unusual and it does indicate a kind of pragmatism. And of course, if you look at the situation on the ground, And Jinim are just as complicit in massacring and killing civilians as any other party. But by portraying themselves in this way, reaching out to people from the same tribe, from the same district, they were portraying themselves as the protectors of these communities.

13:50And that reinforces when they perhaps interacting with these local communities in a way that central governments may never have done at all.

14:05Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

14:38So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

14:48You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. Let's look at the area's genome controls and how its different branches operate. Each branch occupies a particular geographical region. We know that historically what was called Ansar al-Islam under the Diko brothers is operating within Burkina Faso. Equally, we know that Ansar al-Din in northern Mali is operating under Iyad al-Khali. These different branches have specific geographical remits. It also corresponds to ethnic differences between different groups, mainly a Tawarig-based sub-branch in northern Mali. You have the Fulani branch, which is more central Mali under Amadou Kufa.

15:33The branches are rooted in these lands. They're tuned into the needs and grievances of the local communities. And that explains why they have been so successful in turning these to their own advantage and gaining legitimacy in the eyes of the local population at the expense of central governments. These are incredibly remote regions. they've never been sort of part of the centralised authorities in terms of education, local services so when a jihadist group rolls up in a particular village and they engage in preaching they perhaps hand out hijabs and Qurans and then engaging with local people it can be a very effective recruitment tool and a way of legitimising themselves as we are your friends, the government are not And that's very much a strong message when it comes to the human rights agenda by portraying themselves as we are your protectors, the state are the enemy, the state are killing you, we are protecting you.

16:35The main ideological goal of these groups, or JININ, is to chase out foreign intervention from these countries. They say that they are opposed to the regional governments, so that's the governments of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, and anyone who helps them. To underscore their opposition to the authorities, Janine Branches applauds anyone who criticises these governments for their human rights violations, even if it's a Western institution. But the anti-Western sentiments are firmly at the core of these groups. They've always pointed to French and Western influence in these parts of Africa. And these are the crusader forces.

17:17They're there to attack you. They're against your interests. Firstly, it was a propaganda win for them because these Western forces pulled out.

17:32And they said, well, they're pulling out because we kicked them out of these countries. But then Wagner came in and they were able to say, well, this is another era of Russian colonialism this time, and we're also going to do the same to the Russians. So they firstly portrayed the Russians as these people are attacking you, they're killing you, they're engaged in human rights violations. But also the fact that al-Qaeda week in, week out were able to claim attacks against Wagner and the Malian military, it was contributing to their narrative of legitimacy. So they have this anti-imperialist rhetoric, which is very important, but also clearly they talk about atrocities committed against Muslims.

18:15They talk about protecting Muslims. Those are the two kind of key ideological goals that they have. I understand that organisationally they are very much linked to al-Qaeda. But where is the jihadist element in their ideology? Where are the global aims? Well, Jinnim came out of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. In terms of their rhetoric and propaganda, they remain affiliated to al-Qaeda central. They are adopting all of this transnational jihadist rhetoric and those goals. Although in recent months, we've seen some interesting changes, slight shifts in the propaganda, which perhaps might suggest that Jinnim is really focusing on the more local level, talking about local grievances, trying to appeal to local people rather than transnational jihadism.

19:06We've seen calls in recent weeks for perhaps linkages between the northern separatists and al-Qaeda, saying if you separate yourself from global jihad and just focus on what is going on in this country, then perhaps we can collaborate. And that could be a politically savvy way for them to go. It would make them perhaps more palatable to other political groups across the region, but it potentially also makes them more dangerous because they're able to form those linkages with other separatists. And it could only be a tactical renunciation of global jihad saying this is good for us in the short term because we can gain power, but we're not necessarily totally separating ourselves from that longer-term commitment to global jihad.

19:52This is a group that operates across state borders. It is about Islamic governance across the whole region. Staging military operations and providing services to local communities requires solid financing. So where does JANIM get its money from? It's impossible for these groups to sustain themselves unless they are gaining significant revenues from their activities. And it may be done in a relatively benign way by saying that because you are part of our system, you're obliged to pay certain Islamic taxes as part of carrying out your faith. Elsewhere, we have seen this done in a coerced form. It may differ from region to region by being present across northern Mali.

20:38and Niger in particular, you must also think of the movement of people, weapons across large areas of the uncontrolled Sahara Desert. We're talking about people smuggling groups, weapon smuggling groups. And to some degree, there are linkages between the jihadists and some of these criminal networks. And the greater the strength of GINIM and other entities across this region, the more they are able to control these networks to profit from them, but also control them. In part two of this series, we'll explore how the group makes money to finance its operations, and we'll look into more details into something called blood gold.

21:29You are listening to The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring. Let's take a look at the men heading up the main branches of Djinim. Like other aspects of this group, these characters too stray from the mould.

21:48Yeah, so there are some really big characters leading Djinim. and Iyad Khal is probably the most interesting and colourful character. He is a bit of a kind of soldier of fortune, but more than that is also a strategist and has managed to move with the times and remain close to power. He's nicknamed the Lion of the Desert and he's from the noble Ifugas clan of the Tawarig people in northern Mali. He went to Libya in the 70s as part of the Ishumar generation, coming from the French Shomor meaning unemployed. He fought for the Islamic Legion of Gaddafi

22:29and was politicised and learnt presumably how to fight. He came back in the early 1990s and was a senior commander in a rebellion that took place against the government. But very soon after that, he abandoned the rebellion and helped negotiate a peace deal with the government and remained close to power. and by 2007, incredibly, managed to get picked to be Mali's consul in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and had somewhat of a good reputation as a kind of peace broker of sorts so that you could trust with the government. Then at some point during these years, he obviously started being influenced by more jihadist and sort of Salafist teachings.

23:11It's a fascinating transition to follow. Clearly a devout Islamist figure, but he was also for a very long time seen as a legitimate politician in northern Mali. He was a key figure as an interlocutor between the north and the central state in the sort of 2012 uprising. That was this grouping of both separatists, but also the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamists who ultimately ended up fighting each other and that uprising broke down. But that was really what laid the seeds of Jinnim, where he fully moved into the al-Qaeda camp and was seen as an individual who was totally beyond the pale. After 2012, when the Tuaraq rebellion took place, he decided to throw his hat into the ring with the jihadists, which has worked out very well for him because now he's the emir, the top leader of Jinnim.

24:06Do you think that's what's driving his choices, you know, this desire to be close to power once he has tasted it? Or is it pure ideology? I think a lot of people question whether Aghali's religious, his fundamentalist and jihadist beliefs are really there, whether it was more of a cynical attempt to stay close to power. So, yeah, I definitely think there's an argument for that. There were cables that were made public by US diplomats in Mali from around 2007, where Iyad Ghali walked into an embassy, spoke with American diplomats, and they described him as a quietly spoken, reserved, slightly tired-looking man.