In Mali, the militant Islamist organisation Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) is no longer waging a peripheral insurgency but has become one of the central forces shaping the country’s security, politics, and humanitarian crisis. Since late 2025, the al-Qaeda-affiliated coalition has imposed a strategic fuel blockade on the capital, Bamako, launched its first coordinated countrywide offensive, and, together with Tuareg allies, inflicted significant setbacks on government and Russian Africa Corps forces across the north and centre.
Observers now wonder if JNIM will do what Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) did in Syria when it formally severed ties with its parent and reinvented itself as a legitimate political actor. I would argue that while the group will strive for independence, it will also likely keep its link to al-Qaeda intact. JNIM will go on building its own territorial, financial, and administrative base while keeping its ties to al-Qaeda intact. A rupture cannot be ruled out, but it is still very unlikely at this point.
The case of HTS in Syria happened under much different circumstances. The group's institution-building in Idlib did not happen in a vacuum. Türkiye backed the group from the start, when it was still known as Jabhat al-Nusra. It had an open border with Türkiye and received arms and logistical support from 2012 onward. Later, Washington quietly accepted the group’s ideological rebranding and declined to strike its positions.
The 2016 break with al-Qaeda was possible partly because HTS already had a tested channel to an outside patron willing, in time, to convert that relationship into political recognition. Institutions alone did not summon a new patron; that patron already existed.
JNIM has real, if partial, elements of institution-building of its own. In central Mali, the Macina Liberation Front, one of the coalition’s constituent factions under Amadou Koufa, runs its own sharia courts, collects zakat, and enforces behavioural codes across dozens of villages from which the Malian state has effectively withdrawn. In the north, the group taxes smuggling routes towards Algeria, extracting a cut from a trade in cigarettes, fuel, and migrants that long predates the jihadists themselves.
Where JNIM is most entrenched, the International Crisis Group reports, it dispenses justice and levies various taxes; some analysts already describe the result as a decentralised proto-state, administered locally, area by area, rather than from any single command.
But its governance remains patchy rather than uniform. JNIM is a coalition—Macina, Ansar Dine, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s Saharan branch, and others—without the sort of unified command Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, now known as Ahmed al-Sharaa, built in Idlib. And unlike HTS, it lacks a long-standing external patron of Türkiye’s calibre: one able to build, alongside the necessary institutions, a channel for eventually cashing them in for recognition.
Better comparison
The Taliban achieved something JNIM is nowhere near: full control of a state, complete with ministries and a measure of international engagement. Years after retaking Kabul, it still has not formally broken with al-Qaeda. UN monitors and independent analysts continue to describe the relationship as close, even as the Taliban has taken modest steps to keep it out of view.
The reason is simple: no outside actor has made a formal break a condition of dealing with the Taliban. Russia recognised its government without asking for one; China and regional neighbours engage pragmatically; Western states, after withdrawal, have far less leverage in Kabul than they once did.
The lesson is that institutionalisation alone does not produce a rupture. It merely makes one possible—and only if an outside actor turns up both willing and able to make the break a condition of something JNIM wants.
