Extremist violence, ethnic tensions, and authoritarian governance in the Sahel region of West Africa have generated a regional crisis with global implications. After a decade of escalating conflict, governments, Russian mercenaries, and extremist groups alike are using violence against civilians to pursue their interests. The rapid rise of hate speech in recent weeks — especially via voice recordings on WhatsApp — indicates an acute risk of mass atrocities, particularly against the Fulbe ethnic group.
The risk is highest in central Mali, but persecution of the Fulbe across the region is fertile ground for expanding waves of ethnic cleansing. If left unchecked, the escalation of violence could destabilize the region further. Food security is already tenuous, and violence would further disrupt both pastoral migrations and farming activities. Refugee flows will continue to increase, intensifying pressure on neighboring countries that are themselves unstable. As evident in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, persistent violence threatens democratic stability and bilateral relationships with the United States and European countries. While the expanding crisis has devastating consequences for human lives, it serves the interests of private military companies and extremists seeking greater global influence.
Government, Extremist, and Russian Manipulation of Ethnic Grievances
Ethnic divides lie at the heart of the Sahel crisis. West Africa is profoundly diverse, with more than 100 ethnic communities. Relationships between ethnic groups are complex, laden with historical context, patterns of competition and collaboration, trade relationships, and narratives of identity and difference. The colonial powers and subsequent national governments disrupted traditional systems to manage this complexity and failed to replace them with functional State services. Governance weaknesses are particularly acute regarding land and water management. Population growth and climate change create intense competition for resources, a struggle that neither weakened traditional governance nor official justice systems can manage, even where such structures exist. In the face of rising conflict, Sahelian governments have instead scapegoated the Fulbe ethnic group.
The Fulbe (also called the Peul, Fulani, and other terms) are a significant West African ethnic group, numbering roughly 30 million. The Fulbe are strongly associated with transhumant pastoralism (seasonal migration to access pasture for cattle during dry and wet seasons), although contemporary Fulbe use a wide variety of livelihood strategies and many live in urban areas. Despite the complementarity of herding, farming, and trade, Fulbe herders have been cast as outsiders and excluded from narratives of national unity in, for example, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, and Benin.
Elite politicians, extremist groups, and Russian proxies exploit these divisions to destabilize governments and recruit fighters, inflaming grievances and hate between ethnic communities. In their struggle to combat extremism, governments have wrongly equated the Fulbe ethnicity with terrorism and engaged in widespread human rights abuses. They have actively excluded the Fulbe, especially those who are rural and migratory, from political processes and government services. Their rhetoric amplifies stereotypes that legitimize ethnic violence and retribution against entire communities.
Military Juntas and Weaponized Counterterrorism
Furthermore, military juntas have taken power through coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, justifying their actions by citing insecurity and extremism. However, their militarization of rural areas, biased policies, and repressive measures exacerbate these very issues. The juntas have weaponized counterterrorism strategies to silence dissent, marginalize vulnerable groups, and foster environments conducive to mass violence. Just this week, the military regimes of the three countries formalized their withdrawal from the political and economic bloc ECOWAS, which had sought to mediate for peace and stability in the region.
Russian private military company Africa Corps (previously known as the Wagner Group, and now mostly folded into official Russian military structures) has rapidly expanded its presence in the Sahel, promising security and investment in exchange for access to extractive resources. Violence and disinformation campaigns by these actors sow fear and ethnic division in Mali, inflaming the conflict that they used as their excuse to intervene in the first place. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) reports that 71 percent of Africa Corps’ political violence in Mali has been violence against civilians.
The victims of this violence are predominantly Fulbe. In March 2022, Malian forces and Africa Corps fighters killed hundreds of civilians, the majority Fulbe, in Moura, Mali. A recent report by Human Rights Watch documents a series of attacks on civilians since May 2024, carried out by the Malian Armed Forces and Africa Corps, including eyewitness accounts from Barikoro village in northern Mali of the military searching specifically for Fulbe. Government narratives and policies, such as closing livestock markets after the September 2024 terrorist attack, contribute to ethnic scapegoating. According to local researchers in central Mali, Fulbe villages are currently being systematically looted, apparently to fund militia operations and to terrify and displace the civilians. Thousands of Fulbe families have fled, many to Mauritania. Similarly, in Burkina Faso, government-supported ethnic militias kill or force Fulbe families to flee.
In recent weeks, local human rights observers have noted a dramatic increase in anti-Fulbe speech, particularly voice recordings circulating on WhatsApp. The rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of the incitement that occurred in past atrocities, as in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. International human rights observers recognize hate speech as both an early indicator and a catalyst for mass violence. In private social media networks, we have seen Fulbe depicted as sub-human. Some posts play upon the trope that Fulbe are unclean and call for a scorched earth approach, saying that all life in Fulbe villages should be eradicated, down to the flies. We also have seen troubling signs on social media that ethnic militias in Mali are seeking coordination with elements of the Armed Forces accused of recent massacres. For example, messages from ethnic militia leaders that we can’t publish because of security concerns call for greater army involvement, explicitly mentioning military leaders who have been accused of past massacres.
Hate Speech Spreading Across Sahel
Although the situation in other countries is less dire than in Mali and Burkina Faso, hate speech against the Fulbe is escalating across the Sahel and adjacent countries such as Benin and Ghana. In addition to the common tropes casting the Fulbe as terrorists, bandits, or criminals, inherently violent and untrustworthy, dehumanizing language also compares them with pests.
Such scapegoating and marginalizing of the Fulbe has already inflamed ethnic violence in nearly every country in the Sahel. A common pattern is that traditional media or social media report an attack by extremists or a crime by an individual suspected to be Fulbe in an area already rife with ethnic tension. In response, other ethnic groups, on their own or together with national armed forces, carry out revenge attacks on entire Fulbe communities, burning homes and murdering civilians.
In one incident reported to us by local researchers, police near Konna in central Mali hit an IED on Jan. 24 this year. The attack, claimed by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the Sahelian branch of al-Qaeda, reportedly killed four people including the brigade commander. Two days after the attack, police forces conducted an operation against Fulbe traders coming from the Gao area, a possible reprisal for the Konna incident. Seven Fulbe civilians were killed.
If this is indeed retaliatory ethnic violence, it would mark a change in police tactics and may indicate a dangerous turning point. In this charged atmosphere, isolated incidents and rumors threaten to trigger broader cycles of retaliation. An attack on the Fulbe by any of the armed actors in Mali — whether the Malian Armed Forces, extremist groups, Africa Corps, or ethnic militias — could trigger a wave of violence within Mali and across the region. The refusal of Ghana and other countries to accept Fulbe refugees has trapped civilians in a perilous situation. As a result, some Fulbe are contemplating violent self-defense, which could escalate the violence further.
Urgent Need for Intervention
The risk of atrocities against the Fulbe presents an urgent need for intervention.
Sahelian governments must take immediate action to respect human rights, investigate crimes, and hold militias accountable for their actions. They must end ethnically motivated practices and provide security for all citizens. They must immediately reverse censorship of media and allow citizens to access varied and legitimate reporting. The current information vacuum leaves citizens with only messages of fear, hate, and misinformation. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger must restore democratic governance and address root causes of extremism through improved governance and reconciliation, rather than exacerbating those causes with violence. Adjacent countries must reverse policies that marginalize the Fulbe and instead invest in reconciliation, inclusive governance, and respect for human rights.
International human rights and humanitarian actors should increase their support for human rights monitoring and crisis response, taking care to consider the cumulative risks to the Fulbe in different countries. Uninterrupted humanitarian aid is crucial, and assistance for the Fulbe should take into account their specific needs, considering they may otherwise be forced to split up families (leaving women and children more vulnerable) or remain in dangerous areas if they cannot move their cattle across borders. Such support must include advocacy for the mobility of pastoralists, understanding that transhumance is necessary both for regional food security and the cultural survival of the Fulbe.
The imperative to interrupt the downward spiral in the Sahel is challenged dramatically by the question marks the new U.S. administration is placing on foreign assistance and by similar, though less drastic, dialing back on aid by the U.K. and the EU. Military experts must step forward to articulate the costs — in both human and national security terms — of further destabilization in the Sahel. They must articulate the lessons of the Sahel — namely the dire failure of an over-militarized counter-extremism approach; the need to understand and engage local priorities; and, as former Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Leon Panetta did during their tenures, the essential roles of diplomatic and development support. National security experts must speak up about the costs of West Africa’s shift toward Russia and China. As they support militaries in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, they should use Mali and other situations as case studies to demonstrate the counterproductive nature of rural militarization, ethnic militias, and ethnic profiling as strategies, as well as the failed promises of Russian private military companies.
All international stakeholders should diversify their information sources to better understand ground realities. They should be cognizant of the personal and ethnic interests of political elites and balance their narratives with diverse local information sources, especially those from rural areas. That means humanitarian, military, and diplomatic actors will need to hire and engage with diverse local stakeholders, including Fulbe.
Much is at stake for the Sahel, for Africa, and beyond. Massacres and persecution of the Fulbe approach a terrifying tipping point. Millions of people are at risk of violence, displacement, and food insecurity. Without immediate intervention and new approaches, the Sahel conflict will continue to grow, engulfing more communities in violence and undermining governments. On the global stage, extremist networks and Russia will continue to use this crisis to build wealth, power, and narratives about the futility of inclusive democratic governance.