A long-run dataset reframes the kidnap-for-ransom picture across the Sahel. Analysis by researchers at the University of Florida, published in December 2025 and updated in May 2026, examined close to 58,000 violent events between 2000 and mid-2024. Its central finding: the victim profile has inverted. Where Western nationals were the primary kidnap-for-ransom targets until the late 2010s, extremist groups, chief among them JNIM, have since turned on local civilians, with abductions rising roughly twenty-fold since the group's formation in 2017.
The money has not gone away. European governments were estimated to have paid around US$125 million in ransoms between 2008 and 2014, and reporting alleges the UAE paid some US$50 million in October 2025 for the release of Emirati hostages held in Mali. Mass abductions continue: more than 300 people, many of them children, were taken in western Nigeria in late November 2025.
Operator implication: for risk-management and kidnap-for-ransom work the exposure has shifted from the occasional high-value foreign hostage to a routinised local kidnap economy along transport corridors and in rural areas. Journey management, local-national duty of care, proof-of-life and negotiation planning, and hard limits on predictable movement patterns matter more than a headline threat level. Western travellers are not the main target, but they move through the same ground.
