Across nine months, from the Christmas Day 2025 Sokoto strikes to the August 2026 Niamey mutiny, West Africa's most consequential security actions, two American strikes and a Russian rescue of an allied junta, shared one feature: none was led by ECOWAS. This brief examines what that pattern signals, and what must change.
On 25 December 2025, United States Africa Command conducted Tomahawk missile strikes against two Islamic State–Sahel Province and Lakurawa camps in Sokoto State, in Nigeria's northwest, in coordination with the Nigerian government. Less than five months later, at approximately 12:01 AM on 16 May 2026, two dozen US Navy SEALs arrived by helicopter at a compound on small islands in northeastern Nigeria. After a three-hour firefight, an airstrike ended the siege, killing Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, ISIS's global second-in-command and head of its General Directorate of States. Additional strikes on 17 and 18 May killed three further senior ISWAP commanders and brought total militant casualties to approximately 175 by 19 May, according to Nigeria's Defence Headquarters.
US President Donald Trump publicly confirmed both operations. US Africa Command described the May raid as conducted "in coordination with the Government of Nigeria." Al-Minuki had links to the 2014 Dapchi schoolgirl kidnapping and was central to ISWAP's operational coordination. As researchers at the Institute for Security Studies caution, ISWAP's decentralised structure means leadership decapitation tends to have more symbolic than structural impact, and the risk of retaliatory escalation is real.
The only real question the strikes raise is not whether they were effective. They were. The question is why it required American special forces to conduct them twice in 2026, six months apart.
JIDELFA International Research AnalysisTaken together, the two most consequential blows landed against jihadist leadership in West Africa within a single year were both American-conceived, American-targeted, and American-executed, with Nigeria as a coordinating partner rather than a commanding authority, and with ECOWAS entirely absent from the chain of command. ECOWAS has discussed a collective counter-terrorism capacity since 2004. Twenty-two years later, the two most significant strikes against the Islamic State's West African network required the intelligence, surveillance, and special operations capabilities of a single external power, twice, within the same year.
The Lake Chad Basin remains the most violent single theatre in the West African insurgency. On 4 May 2026, Boko Haram fighters killed 24 Chadian soldiers and wounded 46 others in an assault on the Barka Tolorom military base; Nigerian forces responded in kind on 3 June, killing more than 50 ISWAP fighters, only for an attack on a Nigerian Army base two days later to kill at least eight soldiers. What has changed is the insurgency's financial model: ISWAP now collects an estimated $41.5 Million a year through systematic extortion of fishing communities on Lake Chad, a revenue stream that has let it sustain operations even as it absorbs repeated leadership losses.
Further west, Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda's Sahelian affiliate, has waged a campaign of economic strangulation against Mali's capital since September 2025, intercepting and burning fuel convoys along the principal supply corridors from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire. The Port of Dakar, through which more than a quarter of Mali-bound exports transit, lost an estimated $2.6 million a month between September and November 2025 alone. By late June 2026, the Malian government was reduced to escorting convoys under armed guard.
By intensifying offensives against fuel convoys in the south and west, JNIM is paralysing national commerce.
Felix Fodé Bongono, Institute for Security StudiesAfrica Corps, the Russian Ministry of Defence unit that succeeded the Wagner Group following Yevgeny Prigozhin's death in 2023, has established a significant security presence across the Alliance of Sahel States. As of early 2026, the US Congressional Research Service estimates approximately 2,500 Russian personnel in Mali, 300 in Burkina Faso, and 100 in Niger. A further 1,000 troops were expected to deploy to Mali, raising the total to approximately 3,500, according to French investigative outlet Jeune Afrique.
This presence filled the void left by the withdrawal of French forces, expelled from Mali in August 2022, Burkina Faso in February 2023, and Niger in December 2023, and by ECOWAS's institutional paralysis following the coup wave. When the AES formally withdrew from ECOWAS in January 2025, the last institutional thread connecting these Sahel states to regional security frameworks was severed.
The results of Russia's intervention have been strategically ambiguous at best. Africa Corps suffered significant casualties, failed to arrest jihadist territorial expansion, and in April 2026 was forced to abandon Kidal, a strategic town its predecessor Wagner had seized in 2023, following attacks by the Azawad Liberation Front. A helicopter was shot down with all crew killed. "The only victory of the Russians in Mali was the conquest of Kidal in 2023," observed Ulf Laessing of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. That victory has since been reversed. The clearest illustration yet of Africa Corps's shift from counter-jihadist support to explicit regime protection came on 28 to 29 August 2026, when disaffected soldiers stormed the presidential palace, state broadcaster, and Base 101 in Niamey; an estimated 200 to 300 Africa Corps personnel provided drone strikes and ground support that helped loyalist forces retake the airbase from the mutineers, at Russia's own ambassador's public confirmation.
External security actors, whether American or Russian, can degrade specific targets or protect a specific regime. Neither substitutes for indigenous regional security architecture that is politically legitimate, geographically comprehensive, and capable of sustained counter-insurgency.
JIDELFA InternationalECOWAS took a meaningful step in February 2026, when Chiefs of Defence Staff formalised a counter-terrorism brigade at their Freetown summit. The initiative envisions a 1,650-strong Rapid Deployment Force as the core of a 5,000-personnel ECOWAS Standby Force, with troop commitments confirmed by Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal. The ECOWAS Logistics Depot in Lungi, Sierra Leone, is reportedly over 90 percent ready per April 2026 assessments. That capability is real: on 8 December 2025, ECOWAS invoked Article 25(e) of its 1999 Protocol within hours of an attempted coup in Benin and ordered the Standby Force's immediate deployment. It is the clearest evidence available that ECOWAS's institutions can move with real speed, when the threat is a coup against a sitting government.
Compare the timelines. Benin, 8 December 2025: a coup attempt is reported and a multinational ECOWAS force is ordered into the country the same day. Lake Chad Basin, 4 to 5 June 2026: jihadist attacks kill dozens of soldiers on consecutive days and the regional response is national, not collective, with no ECOWAS command structure invoked at any point. The three states at the epicentre of West Africa's jihadist crisis, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, are no longer ECOWAS members. The counter-terrorism brigade therefore operates in a regional security architecture that excludes the principal theatres of jihadist activity.
Unless both the growing presence of foreign terrorist fighters in the region and the near non-existent regional security architecture are addressed, the Sahel could increasingly serve as a platform for transnational jihadi activity.
South African Institute of International Affairs, May 2026The Global Terrorism Index 2026 documents that 64 percent of terrorist attacks in Africa occur within 100 kilometres of a national border. Jihadist networks operate across borders as a deliberate tactical doctrine, exploiting the sovereign-state fragmentation of the security response. Operational vulnerabilities compound this structural gap: troops remain stationed nationally pending deployment orders; the brigade's concept of operations and rules of engagement have not been made public; intelligence fusion arrangements remain unclear; and annual financing has not been secured through a dedicated multi-year mechanism.
JNIM's expansion beyond the Sahel into Benin, Togo, and northwestern Nigeria is no longer an emerging risk; it is an established trend with a measurable trajectory. Jihadist attacks recorded in northern Benin rose from 22 in 2021 to 176 in 2024, an eightfold increase, and a March 2026 assault on the Kofouno military outpost in Benin's Alibori department killed 15 soldiers. The International Crisis Group has described the militant advance into northern Benin and Togo as having "become a major security concern for these states," a marked shift from framing that, as recently as 2022, treated coastal jihadist risk as speculative.
None of Benin, Togo, Ghana, or Côte d'Ivoire are AES members, meaning ECOWAS retains full jurisdiction to act, yet has still not activated a collective mandate against this southward spread. It is the same pattern documented throughout this brief: institutional capability that exists on paper, and a threat that keeps moving faster than the architecture built to meet it.
The following recommendations are directed at ECOWAS member states, the African Union Peace and Security Council, and international partners. They are grounded in the factual record of the current crisis and sequenced by urgency.
The political rupture between ECOWAS and the AES must not preclude operational security cooperation. Ghana's appointment of an envoy to the AES in early 2025 demonstrates that bilateral outreach is feasible. ECOWAS should pursue a dedicated security cooperation protocol with the AES, distinct from membership conditions, focused on intelligence sharing, cross-border pursuit arrangements, and joint early warning.
The Benin deployment proved the Standby Force can move fast against a coup. ECOWAS should now run, and publicly report on, its first full-scale command-post exercise simulating a cross-border jihadist incursion, with published rules of engagement and a defined activation trigger equivalent to Article 25(e).
The self-funding model announced at Abuja in August 2025 is the correct strategic direction. However, contributions must be legally committed through a dedicated instrument, modelled on the AU Peace Fund, that cannot be withheld in response to political disagreements between member states.
Both 2025 to 2026 US strikes succeeded because they were built on precise, persistent intelligence, a capability ECOWAS does not independently possess since the closure of Western bases such as Agadez. Member states should pursue a pooled regional ISR-sharing protocol accessible to the Standby Force command structure.
Given the documented eightfold rise in northern Benin attacks since 2021, ECOWAS should extend Standby Force planning explicitly to coastal states, pairing military readiness with border-community engagement in Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire before the insurgency's foothold there becomes irreversible.
JNIM's blockade economics and ISWAP's extortion revenues are now central to both groups' resilience. ECOWAS and national governments should treat convoy protection, alternative supply-route financing, and disruption of extortion networks as a distinct line of counterterrorism effort, resourced and coordinated alongside the region's humanitarian appeals.
The formal withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger from ECOWAS on January 29, 2025 marks a watershed moment in West African regional governance. These three states, now bound together under the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), represent not merely a diplomatic rupture but a fundamental challenge to the normative and institutional framework that has underpinned regional security cooperation for five decades. The ECOWAS Standby Force remains operationally limited, with only 1,650 personnel projected for deployment in 2026, a figure widely considered insufficient to reverse near-term insecurity across a region the size of Western Europe.
Terrorism now poses an existential threat to the whole of West Africa, with 450 attacks and over 1,900 deaths recorded across the region in the first eleven months of 2025 alone.
Omar Alieu Touray, President of the ECOWAS Commission, November 2025The jihadist threat landscape has evolved significantly. JNIM has demonstrated sophisticated capacity for institutional adaptation, transitioning in key territories from insurgency toward territorial administration, providing rudimentary governance, taxing trade routes, and cultivating local legitimacy in the vacuum left by retreating state authority. In Mali, JNIM has imposed economic blockades on supply routes into Bamako, weaponizing economic dependency to erode state legitimacy. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) and ISWAP add further complexity, with inter-factional clashes in which over 200 fighters were killed near Lake Chad in late 2025.
The withdrawal of French and Western military forces from the Sahel has created a strategic vacuum rapidly filled by Russia's Africa Corps (formerly Wagner Group), which has embedded itself within the military structures of AES states. Competitive external engagement, with Russia, the United States, China, Turkey, and Gulf states all maintaining or expanding footprints, risks transforming the Sahel into a theater of proxy competition, where local security needs are subordinated to external strategic calculations.
Terrorists thrive where the social contract is broken. Sustainable security demands not just military operations, but inclusive governance, climate adaptation, and economic opportunity.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Security Council, November 2025No serious analysis of West African insecurity can limit itself to military dynamics. Governance deficits, climate-induced resource scarcity, and chronic underfunding of humanitarian programs create the fertile ground on which extremist recruitment depends. Over 14,800 schools had closed in the region by mid-2025, leaving 3 million children without access to learning. The Sahel humanitarian appeal for 2025, totaling US$4.9 billion, was under a quarter funded by late 2025, forcing cuts in health, education, and protection programming across the region.
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
West Africa stands at a pivotal inflection point. The choices made by regional bodies, national governments, international partners, and civil society in the next twelve to twenty-four months will determine whether the subregion finds a path toward a more resilient security order, or slides deeper into a cycle of fragmentation, extremism, and humanitarian catastrophe. JIDELFA International calls on all stakeholders to approach this moment with the urgency, resources, and principled commitment it demands. The people of West Africa deserve nothing less.