Mali: JNIM Attacks Key Symbols of Sufism

In Nioro du Sahel, JNIM showed that no one is off limits.

The January 6-7 jihadist attack on the Malian town of Nioro du Sahel feels like a grim turning point to me - for southern Mali and for the country as a whole. The attack, which followed the death of a prominent shaykh, is the most blatant challenge jihadists have made to Sufi authority in Mali since 2012, and is the most significant attack in Mali since the jihadist assault on Bamako in September 2024. The attack is also raising already high concerns for Mauritania, given Nioro’s proximity to the border and given various other attacks and incidents lately, including not just jihadist attacks but also heavy-handed Malian military/Wagner Group operations.

To give more background, Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, JNIM) kidnapped a major Sufi leader, Amadou Hady Tall, near Nioro in late December. Tall was a prominent shaykh within the Tijaniyya, the most prominent Sufi order in Africa. There are many branches of the Tijaniyya, but Tall is a descendant of Umar Tall (d. 1864), a pivotal figure in the history of the Tijaniyya and of West Africa as a whole. Umar Tall waged a multi-front jihad, clashing with the French along the border of what is now Senegal and carving out a territory extending over much of present-day Mali as well as parts of Mauritania and Guinea. His descendants have remained influential, particularly in Senegal and Mali.

Returning to the present, after JNIM kidnapped Amadou Tall, he died in their custody - according to JNIM’s Amadou Kouffa, who might be considered the de facto number two of the organization, Tall was being transported to face interrogation when he passed away. His death was significant enough that Kouffa addressed it in an audio message, and in my view Kouffa resorted to a kind of ambiguity; Kouffa suggested on the one hand that Tall had died due to circumstances and not as an execution, yet he suggested on the other hand that Tall was being hauled before a sort of jihadist tribunal. “We didn’t kill him, so don’t blame us, but we might have, and we claim the right to,” to paraphrase.

Following Tall’s death, JNIM attacked Nioro du Sahel, where Tall’s branch of the Tijaniyya is based as well as another, tremendously influential order (itself an offshoot of the Tijaniyya) called the Hamawiyya. The American anthropologist Benjamin Soares lived in Nioro in the 1990s and chronicled the town’s internal religious rivalries, with additional reflections on the Malian religious landscape as a whole, in his masterful book Islam and the Prayer Economy (University of Michigan Press, 2005).

An excerpt (p. 13) captures some of the core dynamics:

The Hamawiyya’s current leader, Shaykh Bouyé Ould Haïdara, has been described as the most influential religious personage in Mali, as a wealthy and powerful businessman, and as a “maker of presidents.” He is the son of Shaykh Ahmad Hamahullah (d. circa 1943), the founder of the order.

JNIM, claiming responsibility for its attack on Nioro, framed the assault as a military venture targeting the Malian military, and made no mention of Sufism in its statement. Rather, JNIM engaged in a kind of media war with the state, denying state claims that jihadists had suffered numerous losses; JNIM insisted that corpses seen in Nioro were those of civilians killed during the incident.

Despite JNIM’s military framing here, it is hard to overlook the symbolism of a jihadist attack on a Malian center of Sufism. This is not the only such incident - the 2012-2013 jihadist takeover of northern Mali was infamous, in part, for jihadists’ destruction of mausolea and other sites in Timbuktu, including sites associated with Sufism - yet it is one of the most dramatic incidents targeting Sufis in some time. The attack scans to me as not just another episode in JNIM’s growing albeit patchy presence in southern Mali, but as a renewed effort by JNIM to claim sole religious legitimacy within this predominately Muslim country.

Here it is worth noting that JNIM has warned and threatened Malian shaykhs in recent months. Following its dramatic attack on Mali’s capital Bamako in September, one JNIM broadcast included a “message of advice” to the country’s Muslim scholars, warning them not to support the ruling junta. More specifically, the kidnapping of Tall - and the plan to subject him to JNIM’s tribunal - reflected JNIM’s anger at Tall’s interactions with the junta and Tall’s calls for peace in Mali. Then, too, there is an inter-ethnic layer to the conflict; Tall, like Kouffa, belonged to the Peul/Fulani ethnic group, and Kouffa reportedly wanted to shut down Tall’s religious outreach to Peul jihadists and Peul communities.

JNIM and groups like it are commonly described by analysts (including me) as “Salafi-jihadi,” and a constitutive element of Salafism (at least in my view) is anti-Sufism. Yet much JNIM propaganda focuses on a somewhat more generic message, not necessarily specifically Salafi or anti-Sufi in content; JNIM presents itself as the defender of all Malian Muslims, as the voice of religious unity in the face of (in its telling) an unbelieving government backed by brutal Russian mercenaries. JNIM has something to gain, politically, from downplaying Salafi-Sufi tensions. Yet with the kidnapping of Tall and the attack on Nioro, JNIM has shown that this is not merely a war between JNIM and the Malian junta (with a dose of intra-jihadist conflict as well, given JNIM’s regular clashes with the Islamic State). Nor, in JNIM operations, are civilians are only killed as collateral damage; JNIM is willing to strike at even eminent religious personages if they cross, or are perceived to cross, the group’s red lines.