The Sahel After the Western Withdrawal, security vacuums, new actors, and a stability that recedes as it is promised

I. What actually left, and when

The withdrawal was not a single event. It was a sequence, and the sequence matters because each step removed a different capability. France moved first. On 13 July 2021 Emmanuel Macron announced that Operation Barkhane, the 5,000-strong counter-insurgency force that had anchored Western presence since 2014, would end and shrink into a lighter mission.^[1] The drawdown from Mali began on 17 February 2022 and the last French army unit left on 15 August 2022; Macron formally pronounced Barkhane over on 9 November 2022.^[2][3] Burkina Faso followed. In January 2023 its military government tore up the accord governing the roughly 400 French special forces of Task Force Sabre and gave them a month to go; the flag came down near Ouagadougou on 19–20 February 2023.^[4] Niger was the last domino. After the July 2023 coup, France pulled its some 1,500 troops out by the junta's 22 December 2023 deadline.^[5]

The Americans held on longer, then left faster. Washington had built its Sahel posture around Air Base 201 in Agadez, a drone hub for surveillance across the Sahara. On 19 May 2024 the United States and Niger's junta agreed that roughly 1,000 US personnel would depart.^[6] US forces vacated Air Base 101 in Niamey on 7 July 2024 and Air Base 201 in Agadez on 5 August 2024, the latter more than a month ahead of schedule, with the full withdrawal, down to the AFRICOM coordination element, completed by 15 September 2024.^[7] In parallel, the United Nations was shown the door. In June 2023 Mali's transitional authorities demanded the withdrawal of MINUSMA "without delay"; the Security Council terminated the mission's mandate by Resolution 2690 on 30 June 2023, and the peacekeepers completed their exit by 31 December 2023.^[8][9]

Read together, these departures stripped out three distinct things: a strike-and-pursuit capability (Barkhane), an intelligence-and-surveillance backbone (the US drone bases), and a civilian-protection and human-rights-monitoring presence (MINUSMA). They did not leave in that order by accident. They left because they were pushed.

II. The coup belt and the sovereignty argument

The men who pushed them came to power through the gun, and they built a political language around the act. Mali went first, twice: the army removed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in August 2020, and Colonel Assimi Goïta, having chaired the first junta, seized full power from the transitional president in May 2021.^[10][11] Burkina Faso convulsed twice in a single year, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Damiba overthrew President Roch Kaboré on 24 January 2022, and Captain Ibrahim Traoré overthrew Damiba on 30 September 2022.^[12][13] Niger completed the arc on 26 July 2023, when the Presidential Guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum and its commander, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, declared himself head of the transition.^[14]

Sovereignty became the organising slogan precisely because security could not be the achievement.

What unites these regimes is not ideology but a posture. Each justified seizing power by pointing at the same failure: the partnership with the West, a decade old and lavishly resourced, had not stopped the killing. That argument is not cynical invention. It has empirical force, and it is why the juntas have been able to sustain genuine popular support in their capitals even as the countryside burns. The West's reply, that the juntas themselves accelerated the collapse, is also true. Both propositions hold at once, and the inability of Western policy to hold them together is part of why it failed.

The institutional expression of the new posture is the Alliance of Sahel States, the AES. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso signed the Liptako-Gourma Charter on 16 September 2023, a mutual-defence pact forged in the heat of the ECOWAS threat to intervene militarily in Niger.^[15] They upgraded it to a confederation at the Niamey summit of 6 July 2024, announced their intention to quit ECOWAS on 28 January 2024, and made the exit formally effective on 29 January 2025, launching a common passport the same day.^[16][17] A 5,000-strong unified force was announced in January 2025 and reported inaugurated in Bamako in December 2025.^[18] Whether that force can do more than exist on paper is the open question of 2026.

III. The violence did not fall. It moved, and it grew.

If the sovereignty argument rested on the promise of better security, the data have not been kind. The central Sahel was, for the fourth consecutive year, the most lethal theatre of militant Islamist violence on the continent in 2024, with an estimated 10,400 deaths, 55 per cent of the Africa-wide total.^[19] The violence has a dominant author. The al-Qaeda affiliate Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, JNIM, led by the Tuareg commander Iyad Ag Ghaly, accounted for some 85 per cent of Sahel events and fatalities in 2024; the rival Islamic State Sahel Province has shrunk to roughly 15 per cent, down from half in 2020, while remaining most active in Niger.^[20][21]

The geography of death has shifted decisively toward Burkina Faso, which absorbed 61 per cent of the region's militant-Islamist fatalities in 2024, 6,389 deaths, against Mali's 23 per cent and a 66 per cent jump in Niger after its coup.^[22] The single worst day came in August 2024 near Barsalogho, where JNIM-linked fighters killed roughly 400 civilians, probably the largest massacre in Burkinabè history.^[23] A month later JNIM struck Bamako itself, hitting a gendarmerie school and the military airfield, killing an estimated 77 service members and burning the presidential aircraft.^[24] The capitals are no longer sanctuaries.

The fire is also spreading south. Benin recorded around 153 fatalities in 2024 and Togo's toll rose 45 per cent, as the insurgency presses against the coastal states that had assumed the Sahel was someone else's problem.^[25] This is the strategic fact that should most concern Abidjan, Accra and Cotonou: the line of contact is moving toward the Gulf of Guinea, not away from it.

IV. Who filled the space

Into the gap stepped Russia, first as Wagner, then as the state. Wagner contractors arrived in Mali in December 2021, hired by the junta and described, implausibly, as "instructors."^[26] The relationship was sealed in blood early: between 27 and 31 March 2022 Malian forces and foreign personnel killed more than 500 people at Moura, the vast majority summarily executed, according to the UN Human Rights Office.^[27] After Yevgeny Prigozhin's mutiny and death in 2023, the Russian Defence Ministry folded the operation into Africa Corps, under tighter state and military-intelligence control.^[28] On 6 June 2025 Wagner announced it was leaving Mali; Africa Corps announced the same day that it would stay.^[29] The brand changed. The presence did not.

The state did not vanish from the Sahel. It was rented out, and the rent is paid in gold, access and impunity.

The protection has not materialised, and the cost has been borne by civilians. The ACSS found that in 2024 government forces and their Russian allies killed more Sahelian civilians than the jihadists did, 2,109 fatalities across 356 incidents, a 36 per cent year-on-year rise, and that in Mali, 76 per cent of civilian-targeting fatalities were attributable to the armed forces and allied militias.^[30] The military relationship has also proved fragile under fire. At Tinzaouaten, on the Algeria–Mali border, a Tuareg ambush beginning 25 July 2024 inflicted Wagner's heaviest single loss in Africa; casualty claims range wildly, from 20 to over 80 Russian dead.^[31] A protector that can be bled at the periphery is not, yet, a guarantor at the centre.

V. The human ledger

Behind the event counts is a displacement crisis that the withdrawal has done nothing to ease. By 2025 more than four million people had been displaced across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, with the overwhelming share, on the order of three million, Burkinabè.^[32] UNHCR projected that the wider "Sahel Plus" region, taking in Mauritania and the coastal states, would host some 5.6 million forcibly displaced and stateless people by the end of 2026, up from about four million in September 2025.^[33] These figures sit on weak foundations: Burkina Faso's official displacement platform has not been formally updated since March 2023, and the higher numbers are estimates.^[32] That data fog is itself a security fact. A state that cannot count its displaced cannot protect them, and a region whose suffering is invisible to its own institutions is a region governed by guesswork.

VI. What the Institute judges

Three judgments follow from the record above, and the Institute states them as judgments.

First, the "vacuum" framing is misleading and should be retired. There was never a Western-imposed order in the central Sahel that the withdrawal destroyed; there was a counter-terrorism partnership that suppressed symptoms while the state hollowed out beneath it. The withdrawal did not create insecurity. It removed the last external constraint on a trajectory that was already downward. Policy built on the vacuum metaphor will keep reaching for the wrong instrument, reinsertion of force, when the binding constraint is the absence of a functioning state.

Second, the Russian relationship is a transaction, not an alliance, and it will be priced accordingly when it stops paying. Africa Corps trades security services for resource access and regime protection. As long as the gold flows and the presidents survive, it will stay. But it has shown neither the will nor the mass to hold terrain against a confident insurgency, and the civilian-harm record is corroding the very legitimacy the juntas sought. The Institute's assessment is that this is a stabilisation model with a ceiling, and that the ceiling is now visible.

Third, the centre of strategic gravity is moving south. The decisive contest of the next three years will not be fought over Timbuktu or Gao but over the northern districts of Benin, Togo, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, where the institutions are stronger, the coastline raises the stakes, and the insurgency is testing the seams. Whether the coastal states inherit the Sahel's fate is still undecided. That is where leverage remains.

VII. Conclusion, three scenarios to 2028

The Institute offers neither prophecy nor reassurance, but three bounded scenarios for the period to 2028, with the indicators that would distinguish them.

Managed attrition (most likely). The juntas survive in their capitals, Africa Corps holds the cities and key mining zones, and the insurgency consolidates rural control without taking a capital. Violence plateaus at a high level; displacement climbs past six million. The marker to watch is whether the AES unified force conducts a single credible joint operation in the tri-border area by mid-2027. If it does not, the confederation is a flag, not an army.

Coastal breach (plausible, high-impact). JNIM establishes durable operating zones inside Benin or Togo, not merely raiding but holding. The marker is a sustained jihadist administration of a northern Beninese or Togolese district for more than ninety days. Were this to occur, the strategic problem ceases to be Sahelian and becomes West African, and the European interest, migration, ports, the Gulf of Guinea's energy infrastructure, is directly engaged.

Junta fracture (lower probability, sharp consequences). A reversal in Bamako, Ouagadougou or Niamey, a counter-coup, a leadership death, a rupture with Moscow over unpaid bills or battlefield losses. The marker is any public dispute between a junta and Africa Corps over payment or casualties of the kind that surfaced after Tinzaouaten. Fracture would not bring the West back; it would more likely deepen the disorder before any new equilibrium formed.

The recommendation that flows from this is narrow and deliberately unromantic. External actors who wish to matter should stop trying to re-enter the AES core, where they are neither wanted nor effective, and should concentrate on the coastal arc, intelligence-sharing, border-district governance, and support to the Accra Initiative states, where the institutions can still absorb help and where the next phase of the war will be decided. The Sahel's interior has chosen its terms. The question now is whether its neighbours are forced to accept them.