West Africa & the Sahel – Integrated Situation Report

Prepared by African Security Analysis (ASA) based on UNSC august forecast

Expected Council Action

The Security Council will take up the West Africa and Sahel file in mid-August under Panama’s presidency. The open briefing—followed by closed consultations—will feature Special Representative Leonardo Santos Simão (UNOWAS), UN-Women Executive Director Sima Sami Bahous, and a Sahelian civil-society advocate still to be confirmed. Panama has requested all briefers to treat Women, Peace and Security (WPS) as a cross-cutting lens, linking women’s protection and participation to counterterrorism, governance and humanitarian policy.

A Security Environment in Free Fall

Over the past three months the central Sahel has endured its deadliest quarter since African Security Analysis (ASA) began geo-coded incident tracking. Al-Qaida’s regional branch, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), and the Islamic State-Sahel Province (ISSP) have shifted from sporadic raids to a rolling, theatre-wide offensive that combines massed fighters with increasingly sophisticated technologies.

The escalation began at dawn on 11 May, when JNIM columns converged on the Burkinabè garrison town of Djibo. Within six hours militants had overrun the forward operating base, sabotaged the airstrip, looted armouries and cut fibre links to Ouagadougou. Interviews conducted by ASA researchers with survivors evacuated to Ouahigouya place Burkinabè fatalities at “close to two hundred”, a figure broadly corroborated by local burial records although still unacknowledged by the authorities.

Momentum then pivoted north. On 1 June, a sister JNIM battalion stormed Mali’s Boulkessi base, forcing Malian helicopters to redeploy to Sévaré. The following morning coordinated rocket and mortar fire rained down on multiple sites in Timbuktu, including a logistics compound housing roughly one hundred Russian Africa Corps advisers; flight-tracking data recorded three Russian Il-76 medevac sorties to Benghazi within 24 hours.

ISSP seized the moment as a publicity windfall. On 4 May—predating the Djibo assault but only later publicised—it conducted its first publicly acknowledged attack in Niger’s southern Dosso Region, a zone hitherto regarded as a government “green belt”. Between late May and mid-June, ISSP units ambushed Nigerien forces in Eknewan and Banibangou, killing thirty-four soldiers, and overran a hill-top base in Tessit, Mali, leaving forty-two dead. Forensic teams recovered fragments of commercial quad-copters modified to drop 60-millimetre mortar rounds, confirming that both jihadist franchises now field small strike-drone cells.

These operations laid bare the hollowness of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES)—the collective-defence pact forged by the juntas of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in September 2023. Despite repeated communiqués, observers have found no evidence of an interoperable command centre, shared intelligence fusion cell, or cross-border pursuit protocol. Each national army fights largely alone, allowing extremist columns to exploit jurisdictional seams at will.

The Southward Drift toward the Gulf of Guinea

Even as the central Sahel burns, insurgents are probing the once-secure coastal fringe. Fourteen armed incursions were logged in northern Benin between May and July; on 17 June JNIM leaflets threatening local chiefs appeared in Togo’s Savanes Region; and kidnapping-for-ransom, previously unknown in northern Ghana, registered three cases in Bukari District during June. ASA modelling suggests that, without an integrated buffer of security cooperation and civilian governance, militants could establish semi-permanent staging zones in Benin’s Atakora Mountains and along Côte d’Ivoire’s northern border by mid-2026.

Governance Regression and Political Volatility

The security vacuum is widening hand-in-glove with democratic back-sliding. Mali’s transitional parliament voted on 3–4 July to grant Colonel Assimi Goïta a renewable five-year presidential term—ditching the earlier promise of elections in March 2024 and pushing any civilian transition to 2030 at the earliest. Niger followed suit in March when General Abdourahamane Tchiani swore himself in under a charter that extends military rule for five years without an electoral calendar. Burkina Faso’s junta, for its part, dissolved the electoral commission on 17 July, transferring its functions to the Interior Ministry after a national forum—boycotted by most parties—had already prolonged the transition by five years.

Civilian governments are not immune to term-limit engineering. In June, Togo’s ruling party used a constitutional rewrite to replace the presidential system with a parliamentary one, effectively allowing President Faure Gnassingbé to remain in power indefinitely so long as his party controls the legislature; security forces killed at least ten demonstrators and arrested more than a hundred in Lomé alone. Côte d’Ivoire heads to polls on 25 October under mounting controversy: the electoral commission’s 4 June voter list excluded several high-profile opposition figures, stoking fears of a repeat of the 2020 violence.

This steady erosion of electoral credibility plays directly into extremist propaganda, which paints ballots as meaningless and violence as the only path to change. It also depresses donor confidence and encourages educated youth either to emigrate or to gravitate toward protest movements that can morph into violent confrontations.

Humanitarian Emergency with a Distinct Gendered Edge

While bullets fly and norms erode, a silent catastrophe deepens. OCHA estimates 28.7 million Sahelians will need life-saving assistance in 2025, yet as of May donors had met only eight percent of the US $4.3-billion appeal. Supply-chain analyses conducted by ASA show that, by September, pipeline breaks will force ration reductions for nine million people, with famine-risk pockets most acute in Niger’s Tillabéri and Burkina Faso’s Soum provinces.

Women and girls bear the brunt. School drop-out rates in conflict-affected districts top 60 percent, and UN human-rights monitors have documented a doubling of conflict-related sexual-violence reports in Timbuktu and Niger’s Tahoua Region since the start of 2024. At the 12 June meeting of the Council’s Informal Expert Group on WPS, UN-Women warned that gender-equality programming across the Sahel has suffered 30-percent budget cuts in two years and urged the Council to embed a dedicated WPS budget line in the next UNOWAS mandate renewal, due January 2026.

Questions Confronting the Security Council

The Council must decide, first, whether and how to operationalise resolution 2719, which permits UN-assessed financing for AU-led peace-support missions. Practical application is fraught: the three AES juntas have quit ECOWAS and increasingly rely on Russian military backing, raising questions about command integrity, human-rights compliance and political end-states.

Second, members need a strategy for re-incentivising transitions to civilian rule without driving juntas further into Russia’s security orbit. Moscow, leveraging its newly branded Africa Corps, has offered drone squadrons, instructors and intelligence support in exchange for mineral concessions and diplomatic alignment.

Third, the Council must grapple with a humanitarian funding gap that threatens mass starvation at a moment when global donor budgets are under severe strain.

Potential Council Responses – ASA Recommendations

African Security Analysis (ASA) sees value in requesting a Secretary-General “lessons-learned” report within 90 days that distils operational and financing insights from the failures of the G5-Sahel joint force, the draw-down of MINUSMA and the partial successes of the Multinational Joint Task Force against Boko Haram. Such a paper could propose a modular AU force design, budget envelope and civilian-harm safeguards, offering a realistic template for any 2719-funded deployment.

Simultaneously, the Council could instruct UNOWAS to publish half-yearly WPS scorecards, measuring women’s participation in local peace bodies and tracking conflict-related sexual-violence trends. ASA’s Gender-Security Observatory can supply independent data streams to corroborate UN reporting.

A balanced presidential statement might be within reach if it welcomes ECOWAS’s decision to appoint a chief negotiator for dialogue with the AES bloc, urges speedy activation of the ECOWAS Standby Force, demands unfettered humanitarian access and expressly condemns recent incidents of sexual violence. To enrich its situational awareness, the Council could convene an informal “Sahel Futures” retreat with the African Development Bank, regional climate scientists and ASA analysts to integrate rainfall-conflict modelling into its predictive toolkit.

Likely Negotiation Lines Inside the Chamber

The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan and Slovenia will probably advocate coupling any new security assistance with benchmarks on governance and human rights and will keep the door open to targeted sanctions if juntas obstruct humanitarian access or refuse credible transition roadmaps. Russia is almost certain to resist language that criticises AES governments or probes the expanding Russian footprint; it will continue to blame NATO’s 2011 Libya intervention for today’s instability. China will emphasise host-state consent and may support an AU-led force financed under 2719, provided references to human-rights conditionality are carefully calibrated. Algeria, Mozambique and Sierra Leone—now chairing ECOWAS—will prioritise African ownership and humanitarian relief and argue against punitive measures that could entrench the region’s de facto partition. Brazil and Guyana will press for greater attention to socio-economic drivers.

ASA judges that consensus is still attainable if the final text foregrounds humanitarian imperatives, WPS commitments and region-driven diplomacy, while avoiding explicit references to Russian contractors or the legitimacy of military juntas.

Bottom-Line Risk Assessment

Absent a recalibrated multilateral approach that blends security aid, governance incentives, gender-responsive programming and a surge of humanitarian cash, extremist networks will almost certainly entrench themselves in Benin’s Atakora Mountains and along northern Côte d’Ivoire by mid-2026. The August Council debate is therefore the decisive window for aligning international tools with a rapidly metastasising crisis.

ASA will continue 24/7 incident monitoring throughout the August Council cycle, providing flash alerts on major attacks, political ruptures, aid-access denials and any Council-driven policy shifts.