Armed men descended on a Chinese-run gold mine in Narena, a small town some 45 kilometers south-west of Bamako. They burned equipment, abducted workers, and disrupted production before melting back into the bush. It was not the first time. JNIM had struck the same site a year earlier, pointing to a widening pattern of attacks on mining assets tied to Mali's informal gold economy. The message, repeated with grim precision, was not merely destructive it was transactional. The jihadists were not simply at war with the mine. They were collecting on it.
For analysts who track the financing of Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin the al-Qaeda-affiliated coalition better known by its French acronym JNIM the Narena attack was one data point in a much larger financial architecture. Across Mali's gold belt, from the laterite plains of Kayes to the savannah fringes of Sikasso, the group has spent years constructing what security researchers now describe as a war economy a sophisticated system of taxation, extortion, racketeering, and resource capture that has made it one of the most self-sustaining insurgent organizations on the African continent.
As of 2025, JNIM had approximately 6,000 fighters, making it the largest militant force in the Sahel. Its strongholds stretch from Mali and Burkina Faso into Niger and the Gulf of Guinea states, with Burkina Faso alone recording over 280 JNIM attacks in the first half of 2025. That operational tempo costs money. And increasingly, gold is paying for it.
The Architecture of a War Economy
JNIM is predominantly financed through local revenue streams. Artisanal gold mining is the group's most profitable sector it controls or influences mining sites, regulates access, and taxes production and transport. The model is elegant in its brutality: JNIM does not need to dig. It simply positions itself at every chokepoint the road to the mine, the road from it, and the riverbank where ore is washed, the market where it is sold and levies a toll at each.
In localities under their influence, JNIM practices strategic governance to secure civilian support. It negates state regulations by permitting mining and logging in restricted natural reserves, often in hazardous conditions, buying the support of locals frustrated by restrictive state policies or bureaucratic delays in obtaining licenses. This calculated permissiveness is not charity it is co-optation. By opening land that the state has fenced off, JNIM presents itself as a liberator of livelihoods, even as it extracts a percentage of every gram produced.
Once in control of artisanal mines, JNIM demands a portion of each miner's take in exchange for protection. Researchers with the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) have noted that illicit economies represent a means through which JNIM can forge social ties in new areas it enters, by offering civilians a means of income while still denying the state any control over local resources.
The financial stakes are considerable. According to a 2023 United Nations report, artisanal and small-scale gold mining, often unlawful, accounted for about 50% of the Sahel region's gold production robbing states of billions in revenue and playing into the hands of groups that control mining communities and smuggling routes. With over 1.8 million people in the Sahel depending on mining for their livelihoods, the sector represents not just an economic asset but a social terrain that insurgent groups have proven exceptionally skilled at navigating.
Revenue from gold mining is not only financial but also strategic: mines serve as recruitment grounds, storage sites for weapons, and logistical hubs, allowing JNIM to secure both resources and social influence. A single artisanal mine, properly taxed and controlled, can serve simultaneously as a cash point, a depot, and a recruitment office.
The Chinese Factor
Nowhere has the intersection of JNIM's war economy and global commerce become more visible and more volatile than in the fate of Chinese artisanal miners operating across Mali's gold belt. At least 11 Chinese citizens have been abducted in western Mali in attacks on seven industrial sites, of which six were run by Chinese companies. For JNIM, Chinese operators represent a target of particular value: they are often working outside formal legal frameworks, making them reluctant to seek state protection; they have access to capital and equipment; and they operate in remote areas with limited oversight.
Violence has spread across mining belts in western and southern Mali. Since 2025, several Chinese-run operations have been hit, raising concern that JNIM is extracting resources and forcing deals to tap into the country's gold economy.
The pattern suggests a deliberate strategy rather than opportunistic banditry. JNIM is not simply raiding mines it is establishing a protection racket, one in which Chinese operators who pay survive and those who refuse are burned out or abducted.
The dynamic places Chinese miners in an extraordinarily difficult position. Engaged in operations that Bamako has struggled to license or regulate, they cannot easily turn to the state for protection without drawing regulatory scrutiny. Turning to JNIM for "arrangements" exposes them to criminal liability and reputational risk and to ever-escalating demands. Between May and October 2025, ACLED reported that terrorists in Mali abducted 22 to 26 foreign nationals the highest number ever recorded in Mali over a comparable span. Those abducted included victims from China, Egypt, India, Iran, and the UAE.
The kidnapping of a 78-year-old member of Dubai's ruling family reportedly yielding more than $20 million in ransom, described by analysts as a major financial boost for JNIM illustrated the extraordinary revenue that high-profile abductions can generate. But the quieter, lower-profile extraction from Chinese mining operations may in aggregate be even more significant: a steady, renewable income stream that does not depend on the availability of wealthy foreign nationals or the willingness of governments to pay.
The Racketeering Network
The January 2026 attack on the Morila mining site in southern Mali's Sikasso region where attackers burned equipment and briefly held hostages was described by analysts as part of an ongoing economic warfare campaign designed to establish a racketeering network that extorts foreign companies and undermines the legitimacy of the Malian government. (Critical Threats) The site had only recently been reopened by a US mining company in partnership with Mali's state-owned SOREM, with an estimated 2.5 million ounces of gold reserves still in the ground. That JNIM struck it within months of its reopening was not coincidental the group actively monitors economic activity in areas it considers its fiscal territory.
Gold accounted for more than 90 percent of Mali's total exports more than $5 billion in 2023 and reportedly makes up half of Mali's tax revenues and a quarter of the government budget. Nearly half of JNIM's attacks on foreign companies have targeted mines in the Kayes region, the hub of Mali's industrial gold production. This is not a coincidence. It is a campaign.
JNIM controls gold smuggling routes with the complicity of international criminal networks that benefit from the chaos. The blurring of lines between jihadist financing and transnational organized crime is one of the most alarming features of the group's war economy. Gold that passes through JNIM-taxed routes does not carry a jihadist label when it arrives in Dubai or Accra it simply enters the global gold market, laundered through layers of informal trade.
The UAE import data for Mali greatly exceeds that nation's total national artisanal gold production figures, confirming that artisanal gold from neighboring countries are trafficked through Bamako's international airport to Dubai's free trade zone. The value of these informal shipments, researchers at the Wilson Center have noted, is equivalent to a substantial share of Mali's GDP an extraordinary indictment of the opacity of the global gold trade.
Bamako's Regulatory Failure
Against this backdrop, the Malian junta's approach to the mining sector has been a study in contradictions. On one hand, Bamako has pursued an aggressive resource-sovereignty agenda against major foreign miners: the confrontation with Barrick over its Loulo-Gounkoto complex which accounted for about 43% of industrial output in 2024 before it was shut for much of the first half of 2025 demonstrated the junta's willingness to pick fights with multinational giants. A sweeping audit led to the recovery of 761 billion CFA francs ($1.2 billion) in arrears from mining companies.
Yet while Bamako flexes its regulatory muscle against Barrick and B2Gold, the informal sector the artisanal mines where JNIM actually operates remains largely beyond effective state reach. Roughly two-thirds of Mali's territory is beyond state control, making it difficult for the government to control informal gold supply chains a state of affairs that risks their capture by armed groups. The junta has prioritized revenue extraction from those it can reach over security in the territories it cannot.
Mali's industrial gold output fell 22.9% in 2025, with total national production reaching 48.2 tons 22.7% below the government's original 54-ton forecast. The regulatory chaos that drove this collapse had a perverse secondary effect: as formal mining contracted and investor confidence wavered, the informal sector and JNIM's revenues from it faced less competitive pressure from the legitimate economy.
The junta's expulsion of French forces, its embrace of Russia's Africa Corps, and its suspension of French media outlets have all generated headlines. But the more consequential failure may be structural: the inability or unwillingness to extend governance into the artisanal mining zones where JNIM has built its financial infrastructure.
A Southward March
The implications extend well beyond Mali's borders. Since 2024, JNIM has expanded southwards. Although Ghana has not suffered direct attacks, its Upper West region provides logistical access to supplies including fuel, motorbikes, and explosives.
Across northern Ghana, artisanal and small-scale gold mining operates in a context of informality, porous borders, and opaque financial flows conditions that mirror the environments in which JNIM has profited from the gold sector elsewhere in the Sahel. While there is no evidence that JNIM is currently directly engaged in or financially exploiting northern Ghana's gold sector, there are risks that call for close monitoring.
Estimates indicate that 60–70% of gold mined in northern Ghana is sold to Burkinabe traders and moved north into Burkina Faso. These flows, shaped by pre-financing arrangements and informal pricing networks, create precisely the kind of opaque supply chain that has historically enabled JNIM to embed itself. A group that has mastered the art of taxing informal gold in Mali and Burkina Faso does not face a steep learning curve when it looks south.
Conclusion: The Gold That Funds the Gun
The war in Mali is often narrated through the lens of ideology a jihadist project, a postcolonial grievance, a contest between rival visions of Islam and the state. All of that is real. But beneath the ideology lies an economy, and at the heart of that economy is gold.
In the Tillaberi region of Niger, the fuller picture of JNIM's advance included gold armed groups collected taxes from miners, provided a form of protection, and used the revenue to sustain operations across a much wider area. The pattern is replicated across the Sahel wherever artisanal mining meets ungoverned territory: the insurgents arrive not as conquerors but as taxmen, embedding themselves in local economic life before the state even registers their presence.
For the Malian junta, which has staked its legitimacy on a narrative of sovereignty reclaimed and foreign exploitation reversed, the irony is acute. Gold the very resource around which Bamako's resource nationalism has been constructed is simultaneously funding the insurgency that is dismembering the state. Control over artisanal gold mines and the taxation of trade routes not only provided JNIM with revenue but also increased its influence over the local economy an influence that no audit of Barrick's accounts and no confrontation with a Canadian multinational will reverse.
The guns in the Sahel are not running on ideology alone. They are running on gold. And until the governance gap that makes artisanal mining a jihadist revenue stream is addressed through a combination of formalization, economic inclusion, and sustained security presence JNIM's war economy will remain as durable as the metal that sustains it.
Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
[email protected]
+233-555-275-880
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