A Dangerous Model? The JNIM-FLA Convergence and the Future of Armed Group Cooperation in the Sahel.

For more than a decade, Mali has faced two major but largely distinct security challenges. On one side were jihadist groups, most notably Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), which expanded across large parts of central and northern Mali while waging an insurgency against the state and its international partners. On the other side were Tuareg separatist movements in northern Mali, which have long sought greater autonomy, and at times independence, from Bamako. Although these conflicts often overlapped geographically, they generally remained driven by different objectives and operated through separate networks of actors. The political and security landscape shifted dramatically following the military coups of 2020 and 2021. The withdrawal of French forces, the departure of the UN peacekeeping mission, MINUSMA, the growing role of Russian security partners, and the collapse of the 2015 Algiers Peace Agreement reopened old tensions between Bamako and Tuareg armed groups while insecurity continued to spread across the country. As both jihadist and separatist actors found themselves confronting a common adversary in the Malian state and its partners, previously distinct lines of conflict began to intersect in new ways.

It is against this backdrop that the recent coordination between JNIM and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) should be understood. What makes this development particularly significant is not simply that multiple armed actors are operating in the same conflict environment. Mali has experienced that for years. Rather, it is the visible cooperation between a Salafi-jihadist movement and a secular-nationalist separatist group, actors whose objectives have historically been viewed as fundamentally different. This creates a level of complexity that existing counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and stabilization approaches are not particularly well designed to address.

The recent coordinated offensives carried out by the al-Qaeda aligned group of jihadists in the Sahel known as Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the separatist ethnic Tuareg group known as the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) in Mali should not be viewed simply as another episode in the country’s long-running conflict. More significantly, they may represent an emerging shift in the broader conflict landscape across the Sahel, one in which the operational survival, strategic necessity, and shared opposition to the state increasingly override ideological differences between armed groups. The declared convergence between JNIM, a Salafi-jihadist organization, and the secular-nationalist FLA is striking precisely because such collaboration would once have appeared highly unlikely. Yet the tactical cooperation appears to have become mutually beneficial to both groups, producing a level of battlefield coordination and visibility that may now offer a dangerous example for armed actors elsewhere in the region. The more important question now should be whether this kind of convergence is becoming an increasingly attractive model for armed groups across the Sahel.

This possibility becomes especially concerning in fragmented conflict environments across the Sahel, where many armed actors already operate without rigid ideological commitments. In an earlier piece on Nigeria, I argued that bandit networks can gradually become enabling infrastructure for insurgent expansion because deeply embedded local actors often possess mobility corridors, territorial familiarity, smuggling access, and logistical capabilities that jihadist organizations struggle to build independently. The broader implication here is that armed groups do not always need to build new capabilities from scratch. In weakly governed environments, organizations can often access existing networks, relationships, and infrastructure through cooperation with local actors who already possess them. This lowers the costs of expansion and allows armed groups to operate beyond their traditional areas of influence. As a result, convergence becomes attractive because it provides practical advantages that would otherwise be difficult or costly to obtain independently.

The recent developments in Mali suggest that this logic may extend beyond criminal-jihadist relationships alone. Across large parts of the Sahel, armed groups increasingly coexist within dense ecosystems of militias, self-defense groups, separatists, insurgents, and bandit factions. In these environments, convergence becomes easier because cooperation now depends on operational utility and overlapping incentives. Groups motivated primarily by survival, local power, protection, or resource access face far fewer barriers to tactical alignment than organizations bound by rigid political doctrines. This is particularly important in states such as Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria, where localized armed actors already control routes, maintain informal intelligence networks, and operate across weakly governed rural spaces. Under these conditions, convergence can emerge gradually through selective cooperation rather than formal merger, making it harder for states to identify and contain evolving alliances before they become deeply entrenched.

The danger, therefore, is not necessarily that all armed groups across the Sahel will suddenly collapse into unified insurgent fronts. Rather, the greater risk lies in the normalization of flexible, opportunistic collaboration between different categories of violent actors. Once armed groups begin to view convergence as strategically useful, whether for territorial access, recruitment, logistics, or battlefield survival, these relationships can rapidly multiply across already fragmented conflict systems. This would significantly complicate counterinsurgency efforts because states would no longer be confronting isolated insurgencies or localized criminal actors, but increasingly adaptive and interconnected ecosystems of violence. For governments and security practitioners, this shift raises difficult operational challenges. Convergence means that armed groups can no longer be understood solely through their individual identities,or objectives. Instead, the connections linking different armed groups may become just as important as the actors themselves. As cooperation expands across ideological and organizational boundaries, stabilization efforts will likely grow more difficult. Fluid alliances and access to wider networks and resources can increase the adaptability of armed groups while complicating efforts to disrupt or contain them. The result is a conflict environment that is harder to understand, anticipate, and contain.

The JNIM–FLA offensives may therefore represent more than a temporary battlefield arrangement in Mali. They may instead offer an early glimpse into a broader regional trend in which convergence itself becomes part of the evolving logic of warfare across the Sahel. This does not necessarily mean that other armed actors will immediately replicate the JNIM–FLA partnership at the same scale or level of sophistication. However, the apparent effectiveness of tactical cooperation between armed groups may still encourage smaller-scale forms of convergence elsewhere in the region. If such dynamics continue to expand, they could contribute to increasingly networked and adaptive conflict environments, potentially reshaping both the scale of regional insecurity and the types of counterterrorism responses required to address it.