Former Tuareg rebel and Malian diplomat Iyad Ag Ghaly has steered Al Qaeda’s Sahel branch JNIM since 2017, spreading its tentacles in the region and far beyond to Gulf countries. Previously known for his taste for Marlboro cigarettes as well as his closeness to Tinariwen musicians, according to the Wall Street Journal, he is now the most wanted man isn the Sahel, subject to UN sanctions, listed as a “terrorist” by the United States, and facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity.The 67-year-old has turned the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), created in 2017, into the most significant threat in the Sahel, according to the United Nations. Under his leadership, Al-Qaeda has spread from Mali to Burkina Faso, Niger, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. Ag Ghaly, the son of nomadic herders, became radicalised in the 1990s.He was “in contact in Mali with members of jama’t Dawa Wa Tabligh that was promoting Salafism in north and west Africa,” said Rida Lyammouri, a researcher at the Policy Center for the New South (PCNS). A former intermediary in the release of Western hostages, his ties with Algerian jihadists from the GSPC, which became Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in 2007, grew stronger in the 2000s, according to the UN. – ‘Stoning, rape, torture’ -But his real jihadist journey began in 2011 with the creation of Ansar Dine, one of the first groups to seize northern Mali after a 2012 coup, where it imposed strict sharia law. “All those who are not on the path of Allah are infidels,” Ag Ghaly preached on a local radio station in Timbuktu after seizing the legendary city. His brigades carried out public whippings and stonings, banned music, and destroyed 14 of the 16 mausoleums listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. In 2024, the ICC unveiled the indictment: murder, rape, sexual slavery, torture, and destruction of cultural property. Weakened by a French military intervention in 2013 in Mali, Ag Ghaly bounced back in 2017 by uniting the Ansar Dine, Katiba Macina and Al-Mourabitoun groups to form JNIM. His nickname is “the strategist”, said Hans-Jakob Schindler, director of the think tank Counter-Extremism Project (CEP). A highly experienced organiser, his long contacts with Al-Qaeda and the “successes” of the JNIM have made him a respected emir, Schindler added. – Worked as a mechanic -Born in 1958 in the Kidal region in northeastern Mali near the Algerian border, Ag Ghaly comes from the Ifoghas, an influential Tuareg tribe. He worked as a mechanic and administrative officer in Libya and Algeria among other jobs. In the early 1980s, after military training, he joined the “Pan-Africanist Islamic Corps,” Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhadi’s military reserve.”In 1982, I took part in the Libyan deployment in Beirut alongside allied factions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation,” he told an AFP journalist in Kidal in 2010. “Iyad also fought in 1987 during the conflict between Chad and Libya,” added a former elected official from Kidal who knew him. It was in the name of his people’s “suffering,” according to Ag Ghaly that he launched the first Tuareg rebellion in Mali in 1990. “I come from a pastoral background marked by economic hardship, and I grew up in an environment shaped by nomadism, tribal solidarity, and also tensions between the Malian state and the populations of the north,” he told AFP. “We are the sons of the same nation. We are in a better position than anyone else to understand each other,” he said in a 1994 interview.- Islamic caliphate -When the rebellion ended in 1996, Ag Ghaly refused to join the Malian army and turned to business, disappearing from the political and military scene for years. He reappeared in the 2000s, approached by Western services to negotiate the release of hostages held by groups affiliated with Osama bin Laden, while Algerian Islamists and AQIM were establishing themselves in the Sahel. As a consular advisor at the Malian embassy in Saudi Arabia under former president Amadou Toumani Toure (2002-2012), “he became closer to hardline Salafist circles and his rhetoric became more radical,” said a Malian diplomat who knew him. At the head of JNIM, his agenda is to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Sahel countries. His last appearance was in April, somewhere in the Sahel, praying with his lieutenants during Ramadan, looking visibly tired, according to propaganda images.While he is “still at the helm”, according to a European intelligence source, the JNIM is now a “successful” organisation that should outlive him, explained Schindler.
