Sahel jihadists deploy captured weapons, drones to widen terror campaigns – Report

Violence and acts of terror unleashed by jihadist groups in the Sahel are believed to have impetus from local weapons, often acquired by raids on the African militaries, new research published Tuesday has revealed .

UK-based outfit Conflict Armament Research (CAR) highlighted a decade of weapons seizures from armed terror groups operating in the two borderland areas that have become conflict hotspots: the tri-border region of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger as well as the Lake Chad basin comprising Niger, Chad and Nigeria.

Islamic State Sahel Province and the Al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM both struggle for control in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, but “there appears to be no evidence, however, that the groups are able to access weapons directly from outside of the central Sahel,” the report said.

The research is in tandem with many analysts’ understanding of why the groups, including Boko Haram and rival Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), in Nigeria, have become so powerful.

It’s believed that a lot of the terror groups in the region have their origins in local political grievances in countries where governance and the rule of law were already weak.

It was their local effectiveness that attracted the attention of global jihadist groups, rather than the other way around, report co-author Leo Jarry told AFP.

“They’re very local and very opportunistic actors. And then because they’re efficient, they get recognised at the central level of Al-Qaeda and (ISIS),” Jarry said.

Roughly 20 percent of these groups’ weapons came directly from national military stocks, based on CAR’s analysis of 726 weapons seized between 2014 and 2023 — part of a larger set of 5,890 weapons researchers documented across the region in that time period.