Executive Summary
Insurgent groups like Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin in the Sahel and Al-Shabaab in Somalia are executing a strategic shift from direct capital capture to sustained economic and operational attrition, systematically eroding state authority from the outside in. By interdicting vital supply corridors, levying shadow taxation, and establishing parallel governance structures around primary urban centres such as Bamako and Mogadishu, these insurgent organisations force sovereign governments to bear unsustainable financial and logistical costs simply to maintain basic administration. Emulating the long-term territorial consolidation model demonstrated by Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham in Syria, this approach allows insurgents to preserve combat capability, avoid triggering major external military interventions, and progressively hollow out state capacity until conditions dictate an eventual political transition.
Between late July and early August 2026, Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) executed a series of high-intensity, coordinated offensives targeting key military detachments and strategic transit corridors across northern Burkina Faso and central Mali. In Burkina Faso, militant forces launched complex assaults against fortified army positions across the Centre-Nord and Est regions, overrunning regional outposts, inflicting significant military casualties, and capturing heavy military hardware. Concurrently in central Mali, insurgent units tightened blockades along the critical Ségou-Mopti transport axis through synchronised improvised explosive device (IED) ambushes and illegal checkpoints, disrupting military supply lines and halting commercial freight movement.
JNIM had maintained pressure on fuel supplies and key transport routes for months, disrupting commercial activity and raising the cost of moving goods into Mali while the state struggled to guarantee secure access beyond the main urban centres. The blockade demonstrates an operational reach well beyond isolated attacks. JNIM does not need to occupy Bamako to affect the functioning of the Malian economy; control or disruption of the roads and corridors that carry fuel and commercial goods can impose costs on households, businesses, and the security services, while forcing the government to divert resources towards protecting basic logistics. The value of this approach lies in its cumulative effect. Every additional month of disruption can weaken commercial confidence, increase fiscal pressure and reinforce the perception that the state can protect its formal institutions without consistently securing the economic networks on which those institutions depend.
JNIM’s campaign therefore looks increasingly like a struggle over the state’s ability to function, with the capital treated as an important political centre but not necessarily the immediate operational objective. A direct assault on Bamako would concentrate the group’s forces against the Malian state and create a clearer justification for external military intervention at the moment of confrontation. Sustained pressure around the capital produces a different strategic environment. The government must spend more on convoy protection, fuel distribution and security operations while maintaining the appearance of normal administration. JNIM can preserve its forces, collect revenue from areas under its influence and choose where to apply pressure, leaving the state to absorb the financial and political costs over time. The insurgency is therefore gaining from the erosion of state capacity without assuming the administrative burden that would follow a premature seizure of national institutions.
The same logic is visible in Somalia, although Al-Shabaab’s model is more established. Al-Shabaab has continued to exploit gaps in state authority through taxation, coercion, intelligence networks and parallel administrative structures, while attacks and territorial pressure have demonstrated that the Federal Government of Somalia remains dependent on external military support to hold contested areas. The group’s strength is consequently measured through its ability to make government control costly and unreliable across large parts of the country, including areas close enough to Mogadishu to keep the federal government under sustained pressure. An immediate attempt to overrun the capital would change the group’s strategic position by forcing it to govern a large and contested city, defend fixed positions against Somali and international forces and provide services to a population whose expectations would rise immediately after any takeover. Maintaining a coercive and administrative presence outside the capital can produce many of the political effects of control while retaining greater operational flexibility.
This is where the Syrian experience under Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) becomes relevant to JNIM, although the comparison should remain limited. HTS demonstrated that an armed movement can spend years consolidating territorial administration, broadening its political relationships, reducing the visibility of its most uncompromising ideological positions and waiting for the state around it to become sufficiently weakened for a rapid political and military transition to become possible. The lesson for JNIM is that sustained territorial authority, economic pressure and political adaptation can create a more favourable environment for eventual power transfer. JNIM has shown elements of this approach through local negotiations, taxation, mediation and efforts to present itself as a source of order in areas where state institutions are weak. Its growing ability to impose countrywide economic costs gives it an additional lever, as it can shape perceptions of government competence without holding the national capital.
Al-Shabaab remains distinct because its political model is more deeply embedded in long-running shadow governance, and its ideological ties to transnational militant groups constrain how far it can reposition itself for international political acceptance. Its interests are therefore better understood through gradual erosion of state authority and parallel administration. The group can collect taxes, resolve disputes, gather intelligence, and punish non-compliance in areas where government institutions are weak, allowing it to develop a form of practical authority that endures the presence of internationally supported security forces. This creates a particularly difficult challenge for the Federal Government of Somalia because military advances do not automatically translate into permanent administrative control. Territory retaken by government forces can remain vulnerable to renewed insurgent pressure when security personnel, local institutions, and external support are insufficient to sustain a state presence.
The common thread between the Sahel and Somalia is therefore a widening gap between formal state authority and functional authority. Mali retains the formal institutions of a sovereign state and can maintain its capital, yet JNIM can obstruct the transport networks required to sustain national economic activity. Somalia has internationally recognised federal institutions and a large external security presence, yet Al-Shabaab can continue to collect revenue and exert coercive authority across territory beyond the effective reach of government. This weakens the assumption that territorial insurgencies must either govern openly or lose relevance. An insurgency can operate as a parallel authority, selectively interrupt state functions, and wait for institutional weakness to accumulate.
The international dimension reinforces this calculation. Persistent insurgent pressure has drawn sustained attention from the United States (US) and European governments, while governments in both Mali and Somalia remain under pressure to demonstrate that security partnerships can produce durable improvements. JNIM can therefore impose costs without directly confronting every external military capability concentrated in the region. Al-Shabaab similarly benefits from the political difficulty of sustaining long-term external security commitments when the Somali state continues to depend on them for core functions. The insurgent objective need not be the defeat of foreign forces in battle; it can be to outlast the political will to finance and sustain a security architecture that has not resolved the underlying governance problem.
This produces a different calculation for governments. A strategy based primarily on preventing insurgents from taking capitals can remain effective in the narrow military sense while failing to reverse the erosion occurring around those capitals. The longer JNIM can disrupt Mali’s economic lifelines and the longer Al-Shabaab can maintain parallel authority across contested areas, the greater the possibility that state institutions become dependent on increasingly expensive security measures simply to preserve existing levels of control. The central issue heading deeper into the next phase of the conflicts is therefore whether governments can restore the economic and administrative functions that insurgents are progressively replacing, because a capital that remains formally secure while its surrounding systems of commerce, taxation and local authority continue to weaken leaves the state exposed to a political transition that insurgents can enter when geopolitical, military, and domestic conditions eventually become more favourable.