Other MoA event in Oursi, Oudalan, Sahel region, Gonadaouri area, Burkina Faso on Wed 9th September 2026

Sahel: violent fighting between Jnim jihadists and ISIS jihadists on the Mali-Burkina border

Major fights have been between Jnim jihadists linked to al-Qaeda and their Islamic State rivals in the Sahel (ISI) since August. These fightings are taking place on the border between Mali and Burkina Faso, not also far from the Nigerien border. The last clashes took place at the end of last week, mainly on Friday, October 9 in Gonadaouri, in the Burkinabe province of Oudalan. They have killed several hundred people. The stakes: ideology and control of territories. 

The Sahelian branch of the Islamic State claims to have killed more than 400 Jnim fighters a week ago in Udalan. A claim published Thursday in Al Naba, the Islamic State propaganda newspaper.

“The record of ISIS is always false,” said a West African researcher, a keen connoisseur of jihadist groups. Several specialized sources claim that the deaths are numerous on both sides and that Islamic State commanders in the Sahel have been killed by the Jnim. The Jnim, for its part, has not officially communicated on these clashes.
Structural rivalry

In any case, no reliable and independent toll can be established at this stage on these very large-scale fighting, which has brought together several hundred fighters. For while both the Jnim and the Islamic State fight the Sahelian regimes in the name, according to them, of Islam, their doctrinal conceptions and long-term strategies differ, prohibiting any alliance and arousing these bloody confrontations.

“The two groups share the same potential living space and the same recruitment pools, it is structurally a rivalry,” analyzed last June in Le Grand Continent Wassim Nasr, a journalist from France 24 and a researcher specializing in jihadist groups, recalling that these fratricidal fights had begun as early as 2019.