Security Risks of Centralized Satellite Internet in Junta-Led Sahel States

Security Risks of Centralized Satellite Internet in Junta-Led Sahel States

Executive Summary:

• Commercial low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite internet is rapidly expanding across the central Sahel, giving civilians and states connectivity beyond fragile terrestrial networks, while also enabling violent extremist groups to coordinate in remote areas with fewer interception constraints.
• Niger, Mali, and Chad are shifting from bans or informal tolerance to licensing-and-control regimes built around approved distribution channels that can improve traceability but also increase state leverage over connectivity.
• Centralizing satellite connectivity creates chokepoints that increase the payoff of disruption and coercion, ranging from illicit diversion and “ring-fencing” to cyberattack and jamming/spoofing risks. At the same time, bloc-level AES cooperation with Russia may trade one dependency for another.

Throughout 2025, jihadist groups in the Sahel increasingly turned to satellite networks such as Starlink to coordinate activities, taking advantage of policy shifts toward commercial low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite internet in Niger, Mali, and Chad (African Security Analysis, September 17, 2025). In October 2024, Mali’s transitional authorities lifted the six-month suspension on importing and commercializing Starlink kits, while building a regulatory framework and a platform to register and identify users and equipment, explicitly linking legalization to the presence of controllable interlocutors for national services (Koulouba, October 9, 2024). Niger and Chad soon moved in a similar direction through licensing actions that formalize the provision of commercial satellite services, with officials framing LEO connectivity as a solution to coverage gaps in states with sparse and contested terrestrial infrastructure (ARCEP Niger, November 21, 2024; Reuters, November 12, 2024).

This pivot toward “legalize to control” changes the counterinsurgency environment in the Sahel. Control may improve state visibility over licit users, but it does not reliably deny armed actors’ access. The legislation, moreover, concentrates critical connectivity within governance and technical chokepoints that are vulnerable to coercion and disruption (GI-TOC, May 2025; ENISA, March 2025).

Commercial LEO satellite broadband has shifted from a marginal connectivity option to a material variable in the security landscape of the central Sahel. Its appeal is straightforward: portable “kits” can provide connectivity without reliance on local telecommunications networks—the networks most prone to gaps, sabotage, or intermittent outages in conflict zones (GI-TOC, May 2025). That same portability, however, makes satellite internet as applicable to armed groups and traffickers as it is to rural communities and state services.

Across Niger, Mali, and Chad, the regulatory trajectory is converging on centralization. Niger formalized a legal basis for operations via a decree granting a five-year license for fixed-satellite internet in low-Earth orbit, open to the public nationwide, reportedly subject to enforceable technical and service conditions (ARCEP Niger, November 21, 2024). Chad announced approval of Starlink licensing in November 2024 following multi-year discussions, presenting satellite broadband as a means to extend access in areas where fiber-optic networks do not reach (Reuters, November 12, 2024). Mali’s approach is the most explicit about its intent: an initial drive to dismantle and prohibit terminals was followed by a shift toward feasibility, specifically by creating official interlocutors and enabling a state-run identification and registration platform (Koulouba, October 9, 2024).

The central dilemma for counterterrorism efforts is the dual-use of technology. The same attributes that make satellite broadband attractive to civilians—mobility, rapid deployment, and independence from local infrastructure—also make it appealing to violent extremist organizations operating across porous borderlands. Field-research reporting describes how groups linked to Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) can use satellite connectivity to support dispersed-unit coordination and to rely on mainstream encrypted applications for messaging, voice, and file transfer. This complicates intercept-based approaches that historically benefited from chokepoints in terrestrial networks (GI-TOC, May 2025). Additional analysis underscores that satellite internet can expand the reach of extremists in conflict-prone areas with limited conventional infrastructure, enabling both operational planning and propaganda dissemination. (GNET, December 18, 2024).

Illicit supply chains reinforce this problem. Detailed reporting traces trafficking routes that move kits from Nigeria into southern Niger, via hubs such as Maradi and Zinder, then onward to Niamey and Agadez, into northern Mali corridors, and into Chad through the Lake Chad Basin (GI-TOC, May 2025). Traffickers reportedly break kits into components, mix them with legitimate goods, and use bribery to bypass controls, tactics that exploit uneven enforcement capacity in frontier zones. Mali’s own communiqué acknowledged an enforcement gap, noting that kits already sold and installed continued to function and “can be in bad hands,” a rare official admission that prohibition does not equal denial (Koulouba, October 9, 2024).

Centralization, then, is more a reconfiguration of leverage. Licensing approved sellers can make providers legible to regulators and enable end-users to be registered (Koulouba, October 9, 2024; ARCEP Niger, November 21, 2024). Yet these mechanisms also create new internal-security tools in junta-led contexts. Mali’s stated purpose—identifying users and equipment and ensuring controllable interlocutors—illustrates how counterinsurgency logics can merge with domestic control incentives (Koulouba, October 9, 2024). Measures such as targeted service denial in specific areas, sometimes described as “ring-fencing,” may temporarily inhibit armed-group connectivity but risk civilian backlash if populations lose access to services (GI-TOC, May 2025). Separately, internet shutdown monitoring and coercive restrictions are normalized instruments across parts of Africa; in that environment, centralized satellite governance can complement existing toolkits by making legal satellite access more permissioned (Access Now, 2024).

The technical risk is equally important. Satellite systems depend on interlocking space, ground, and user segments, and threat assessments emphasize that cyberattacks against satellite systems can be executed from the ground and do not require spacefaring capabilities (ENISA, March 2025). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has also highlighted that jamming and spoofing threats to satellite communications signals, as well as cyberattacks against ground infrastructure, are recurring hazards faced by commercial space partners (NATO, October 3, 2024). In Sahel states, where critical connectivity increasingly routes through a limited number of providers and control layers, disruption can produce wide-area effects, whether from hostile interference, cyber compromise, or coercion directed at a small number of institutional nodes (ENISA, March 2025).

Finally, bloc-level centralization is emerging alongside commercial licensing. In September 2024, ministers from Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso met with representatives of Russia’s space sector to discuss telecommunications and “surveillance” satellites for border surveillance, national security, secure communications, and disaster monitoring (BBC, September 24, 2024). Related reporting described plans for a joint AES communications satellite enabling multi-service connectivity and secure, encrypted communications (Ecofin Agency, September 2024). While such projects are framed as sovereignty-building, procurement, manufacturing, integration, and training pipelines can embed long-lived dependencies on external providers even as leaders claim greater autonomy (Xinhua, November 2, 2024).

Satellite internet is reshaping the Sahel’s security environment by reducing the state advantage historically derived from controlling chokepoints in terrestrial infrastructure, while simultaneously giving regimes new levers to discipline connectivity (Koulouba, October 9, 2024; GI-TOC, May 2025). The result is an action–reaction cycle: armed groups and traffickers adapt quickly, illicit markets persist, and attempts to centralize control create both political risk and operational fragility (GI-TOC, May 2025). For junta-led states, the near-term temptation will be to treat satellite connectivity as permissioned infrastructure. The longer-term danger is that concentrating access into a few technical and governance nodes increases the payoff for disruption by militants, rival states, or criminal intermediaries (NATO, October 3, 2024; Access Now, 2024; ENISA, March 2025).