Name: How al Qaeda Stands on the Edge of Toppling a Government
Uploaded: 2025-11-18T17:25:00Z
Duration: 6 min 42 s
Description: Al Qaeda is sieging the capital of Mali, the West African nation nearly twice the size of Texas. WSJ explains how 24 years after the 9/11 attacks, the region is now the center of global terrorism.

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Al Qaeda is sieging the capital of Mali, the West African nation nearly twice the size of Texas. WSJ explains how 24 years after the 9/11 attacks, the region is now the center of global terrorism. Photo Illustration: Ksenia Shaikhutdinova/WSJ

https://m.wsj.net/video/20251118/5e9980e7-e1dd-41cc-8d17-f8ba7af1f14f/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Al Qaeda is sieging the capital of Mali, the West African nation nearly twice the size of Texas. WSJ explains how 24 years after the 9/11 attacks, the region is now the center of global terrorism.

How al Qaeda Stands on the Edge of Toppling a Government

Reporter: This is the new face of Al Qaeda and its fighters are now on the doorstep of this capital, choking off fuel and food, sending residents scrambling and the US embassy evacuating. If the city of Bamako falls, the terror group could soon dominate the whole country of Mali.

It has become, with that scenario, a real possibility.

Reporter: But what does the group actually want? And 25 years into the War on Terror, how are Al Qaeda militants still gaining ground? This Al Qaeda branch is called Jama'at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin, known by the initials JNIM, or JNIM, seen here in videos released by its propaganda arm. Its roughly 6,000 fighters span several countries in the Sahel, where the Sahara Desert and the Savannah meet, including Mali.

They have connections with both the Taliban and Al Qaeda Central in Pakistan and Afghanistan. So the connection is pretty deep actually, despite the physical distance.

Reporter: The heart of that connection is Iyad ag Ghali, once a whiskey-drinking, Marlboro-smoking tribal leader. Over two decades ago, ag Ghali gave up rock and roll and turned to hard line Islam. In 2017, he united three jihadist groups into JNIM, pledging its allegiance to Al Qaeda. In nearly a decade since, JNIM has been at the front of a new wave of insurgency across West Africa. The Sahel is now the epicenter of global terrorism.

There were issues of governance generally in Africa, so not just in the Sahel, that led to a rise of the jihadist movements. And after Al Qaeda become largely irrelevant in the Arab-Muslim world, it grew exponentially in Africa.

Reporter: French forces, with US support, started intervening in 2014, helping local governments successfully push back Al Qaeda militants. But the group was never defeated, just contained. And local military officers frustrated by the lack of progress, seized power across the region, a wave of coups that started in Mali in 2020. The new military juntas kicked out Western forces. In Mali, Army General Assimi Goita instead turned to Russia, and its Wagner group mercenaries.

They decide to do a scorched earth policy, which they go to villages, they say, we're gonna flush out Al Qaeda, and even if we don't, we're gonna spread terror. And it's gonna become very difficult for Al Qaeda to function. They'll have no support. The opposite obviously happens. Al Qaeda is, you know, support increase, a lot of villagers seek protection from Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda expands.

Reporter: At the same time, JNIM was seizing gold mines, extorting villagers, and profiting from drug and human trafficking rounds. It used those funds to gain ground, biding its time in the vast expanse of a country nearly twice the size of Texas. That moment arrived this summer when Wagner mercenaries pulled out and Russia agreed to send a new defense ministry force.

Well with that force, they have no experience of the terrain. And they are inefficient. So the thing that JNIM did was they actually started to attack convoys, got really enormous amount of weapons, which we see now daily being seized. And that gave them the power and the strength to then start really going after the capital.

Reporter: JNIM used those weapons not to assault Mali's capital Bamako, but to siege it. The landlocked nation relies on imports, but with strategic attacks on fuel tankers, the group has strangled those crucial lifelines.

They saw that, oh, the military cannot respond anymore because they don't have access to fuel. The military has, you know, aircraft, helicopters, much better equipped. But you know what? If they can't fly, it's pointless.

Reporter: Residents now spend days waiting for fuel with lines clogging the capital's streets. Blackouts have spread, schools were shut for two weeks, and food prices have spiked in a country already facing food insecurity. But in some rural parts of the country where more than half of Mali's 24 million people live, JNIM maintains support.

Each party involved is killing mostly defenseless people. But the statistics say the majority are being killed by Wagner. The very force that was supposed to be, you know, counter-terrorism. Second largest number is the Malian military and their civilian allies, you know, militias, then Islamic State and then Al Qaeda. A lot of people thought, well, if I'm gonna be killed, you know, I may as well join the bad guys because in this context, the bad guys to me are back there. They're the Russian and they're military allies.

Reporter: Malian security forces continue to fight back using drone strikes to pick off JNIM fighters as well as raids like this one. But JNIM militants are agile, often seen traveling by motorbike in their propaganda videos with control over rural areas giving them cover.

Every time they made some progress, let's say they carry out offensive, JNIM comes back and basically retake the territories. They created this very big spiderweb that surrounds the cities. Obviously the end game is takeover, but you don't need to take over necessarily through door-to-door fighting in the city. That's not what asymmetrical insurgencies do. They just leave the regime to crumble like it happened in Syria, like it happened in Afghanistan, and then when it's kind of rotten to the core, it collapses by itself. You just enter without a shot.

Reporter: Down the barrel of JNIM guns, Mali's military leaders may be turning to the United States. Its foreign minister recently spoke to senior US State Department officials who talked of, quote, greater cooperation. But the military junta is on the back foot, also battling an ISIS affiliate and separatist forces in the north where few people live. JNIM offered General Goita an ultimatum last month, implement strict Islamic law nationwide or relinquish power.

Or you have a political settlement where you introduce more hard line Islamic law into a country's government and you kind of effectively ideologically and socially surrender to the jihadists without one bullet being shot in Bamako.

Reporter: Some analysts say JNIM isn't capable of actually governing, but their effort to build an Emirate has been expanding in neighboring Burkina Faso, Niger, and beyond. The question becomes what risk will that pose to others? Just as Al Qaeda hid behind the Taliban in Afghanistan a quarter century ago, some are asking what may come out of Mali in the years ahead.

First, you consolidate to take control of this territory and mold it under, you know, your vision of the world of religion. And as we've seen in the past, it's only when you feel secure that you then start thinking about going after international targets.

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