The meetings have become routine. Every few months, jihadists in Mali affiliated with al Qaeda summon the men of Poutchi to a mud-brick mosque to collect tax on their crops and cattle, and later distribute food, medicine and animals to the poor.
Five years ago, the same militants threatened to slit the throat of anyone in Poutchi – including the imam – who questioned their interpretation of Islam, recalls Amadou, a herder who lives in the village by the Niger River.
“Now, they don’t talk like that,” Amadou said, describing how the militants focused more on spreading their religious message without threats or violence. “The dynamic has really changed.”
The jihadists are from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), a group that pledged allegiance to al Qaeda when it was founded in 2017 and has spent the last decade imposing itself through fear and force across the Sahel region of West Africa, banning music, smoking and wedding celebrations as it goes.
Initially confined to desert and mountain hideouts, JNIM has gained in strength since the Malian army officers who seized power in 2020 kicked out some 15,000 French and UN soldiers and turned to Russian mercenaries to help keep the insurgents in check.
JNIM demonstrated its newfound power with audacious attacks across Mali in April, hitting the airport in the capital Bamako, killing the defence minister and seizing a string of army bases in the north in coordination with Tuareg-led separatists.
Mali’s government describes both groups as terrorists responsible for violence and instability in the country. Moscow has pledged to continue fighting insurgents in Mali.
Yet the jihadist group now sits at the heart of an expanding belt of militants aligned with al Qaeda and Islamic State stretching 3,000 km (1,900 miles) across West Africa. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned in November that the groups were linking up and presented a growing global threat.
Away from the high-profile military successes, however, a shift is taking place in areas where JNIM’s authority is established, residents said.
Its rhetoric has softened. Militants are assuming administrative roles, resolving festering land disputes between herders and farmers, allowing aid groups to come and go and letting some government employees return to JNIM villages to spend holidays with relatives, according to seven people living under JNIM rule in central Mali who spoke to Reuters.
“The stronger they have become, the less brutal they have to be,” said Corinne Dufka, a Sahel expert who has studied the growth of jihadists in Mali for over a decade.
Dufka said JNIM was succeeding to govern in its strongholds, but that residents’ acquiescence was also a survival strategy. “There is a combination of coercion, fear and persuasion,” she said. “For many villagers, including those who have lived, married, and grown up under the group, they have just accepted that this is the new reality.”
For fear of reprisals, the residents spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, or that only their first names be used.
Neither Mali’s government nor the military’s spokesperson responded to requests for comment for this story.
The shift illustrates the evolution of the Islamist militant movement in Mali over the last 15 years.
Jihadist groups first seized swathes of Mali in 2012 after allying with Tuareg separatists. The mix of local and foreign militants imposed a harsh interpretation of Islamic law, with public executions, floggings and the destruction of centuries-old mausoleums in the city of Timbuktu.
JNIM, formed from four of those groups, is increasingly seeking to show it can govern areas it seizes peacefully and thereby earn political legitimacy, according to Sahel experts and Tuareg-led separatists working with JNIM.
