Across the central Sahel, three things are happening at once. The Western partners that ran the security architecture of the last decade are leaving. The violence has moved from the rural periphery to the capitals. And the juntas installed by coup have stretched their "transitional" mandates into multi-year tenures with no published return to civilian rule.
Any one of these would matter on its own. The combination describes an operating environment that bears no real resemblance to the one most external operators are still posturing for.
Western disengagement is a fact, not a posture
France's military withdrawal from Chad has begun. Niger has started planning for the US withdrawal from Air Base 201 at Agadez. Operation Barkhane is closed. The G5 Sahel Joint Force is dormant. The pattern of Western disengagement now spans Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. Cameroon is the only partial exception: the United States is preparing to re-establish presence at Salak and is finalising plans to redeploy to Maroua after a seven-year absence.
The replacement is Russia's Africa Corps, successor to the Wagner Group. It is now the de facto external security partner across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Recent reporting has the Corps moving closer to Bamako and conducting drone strikes in central Mali. Human Rights Watch has documented grave abuses against civilians by both Islamist armed groups and Malian forces, with the Africa Corps named explicitly.
For corporate security planning, the operative point is not whether the Russian arrangement is more or less effective at counter-insurgency than the French one. The operative point is that the assistance frameworks, evacuation corridors, intelligence-sharing arrangements and partnerships that underwrote the last decade simply do not apply any more.
The violence has moved to the capitals
From 2016 to 2022, the dominant pattern was rural insurgency. Attacks on peripheral military bases, remote markets and villages, cross-border convoys. The reference frame for capital-city risk was a generation of relative urban security.
That frame has broken. In Niger, an attack on Diori Hamani International Airport in Niamey killed 13, including 11 security personnel; ISIS released footage of weapons captured from a Nigerien military base. Canada and Belgium upgraded their advisories to "avoid all travel". JNIM landmine attacks on the Bamako-to-Kayes highway have killed and injured dozens, and a US security alert now advises against travel on the Bamako-to-Sikasso corridor, the spinal trunk road of the country. JNIM has placed a multi-million-euro bounty on Mali's transitional president, Assimi Goïta. The Malian government has closed 39 forests and natural reserves as military zones and banned motorcycle circulation outside major urban areas.
The change is in the targeting envelope, not in any single incident. Capitals and capital infrastructure (airports, headquarters, presidential persons, trunk roads) are now attacked routinely. The security calculus for staff travel, embassy operations and supply lines has changed even where no specific corporate asset has been hit.
The transitions are not transitional
Mali's transitional mandate has reportedly been extended to 2030 without elections. Burkina Faso and Niger have similarly indefinite arrangements. The premise of the post-coup security partnerships, that the military governments would shepherd a return to civilian rule on a defined timetable, has been quietly abandoned by those same governments. ECOWAS has no meaningful leverage to compel a different outcome after the Alliance of Sahel States exit.
This matters operationally because it forecloses the strategic option many companies were holding in reserve: wait out the transition, re-engage when the elected government returns. There is no return. The current governing arrangements are the long-run governing arrangements, and they are increasingly hostile to the Western diplomatic and commercial relationships that defined the previous decade.
What the base rates say
Coup success in Sub-Saharan Africa, averaged across 1950 to 2024, sits at roughly 2.3% per country-year. In the central Sahel for 2020 to 2026, the realised rate is more than an order of magnitude higher. The point for forecasting is the divergence. This is a regional regime operating well outside its historical envelope, and any forecast anchored only on the long-run rate will systematically under-price the next twelve months.
The same caveat applies to armed-conflict onset, capital-attack frequency and what political scientists call "irregular leader change". Each has a defensible long-run base rate. None of them, applied to the central Sahel in 2026, gives you the right number.
What we are watching
The first signal is whether Cameroon's reinforced US posture holds. The withdrawal pattern has been near-universal; Cameroon is the visible exception. If the Salak redeployment proceeds and Maroua follows, that is a thin re-anchoring of Western presence on the southern edge of the arc. If it stalls, the disengagement is total.
The second is capital-attack tempo. A second airport attack in any of Bamako, Ouagadougou or N'Djamena would close the window on routine corporate aviation across the region. The current trajectory points towards that outcome.
The third is whether the Africa Corps suffers a serious battlefield reverse. A meaningful loss for the Russian replacement would create acute domestic legitimacy pressure on the transitional governments at the same moment Western partners are unavailable to step back in. The downstream regime-stability picture would shift quickly.
The Crisis Radar daily monitor tracks these signals and the related country indicators across all five Sahel states.