Sahel’s Al Qaeda branch leader vows to start new Jihad phase against juntas, Russian mercenaries

A new phase of Jihad against the military juntas and Russian mercenaries in the Sahel has started for Al Qaeda in the region, the leader of the terrorist group, Iyad Ag Ghaly, has said in a new video message published online.
Speaking publicly for the first time since 2017, the leader of the militant organization said the new phase of Jihad will focus on fighting local armies in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso and mercenaries from the Russian Wagner group whom he blamed for committing massacres against local civilian population. Malian jihadist leader, Iyad Ag Ghali, is widely regarded as the junta’s ‘public enemy number one’. Ghali is the US- and UN-designated Malian leader of Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM). According to Counter Extremism Project, given the Sahel’s importance in expanding al-Qaeda’s current operations, it is suspected by regional scholars that Ghali may now be within al-Qaeda’s “senior leadership.”
The Africa Report, a Paris-based news organization, has recently reported that as the number of kidnappings in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger has soared in recent years, this trend was blamed on JNIM, which has become adept at abducting people and has made it a pillar of its expansion strategy in the region. Dozens of Westerners and hundreds of Malians, Burkinabès and Nigeriens have been kidnapped or taken hostage in the Sahel-Saharan strip over the past decade, as the chaos of a vast jihadist insurgency has spread across the region, with neither the local states nor their foreign partners able to contain it. While kidnappings in the Sahel are carried out by a variety of actors such as armed militias or criminal entities, the vast majority — or 845 of the 1,100 kidnappings, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) — are attributed to the various jihadist groups roaming the region, in particular the Iyad Ag Ghali-led JNIM.