The possible release of the European citizens taken hostage by ISIS in the Sahel

Istanbul. Reports of the release, on 10 September, of two European women – both of whom were taken hostage in the Sahel in 2025 and had been living in local communities for years – were played down shortly afterwards by the few official comments that emerged. “There is encouraging news, but the complex and highly dangerous process of securing their release and handover has not yet been successfully completed,” stated the Austrian Foreign Ministry in a note regarding the case of one of the two women, the Austrian citizen Eva Gretzmacher, who was abducted in Agadez, Niger, in January 2025. And indeed, such cases are almost always complex. Often, even years later, little is understood of what really happened behind the scenes, both with regard to the kidnappings themselves and the actions taken to secure the hostages’ release.

According to some sources, the release of the two women was the result of Libyan mediation led by Tripoli, via channels linked to those that had led to the release of US citizen Kevin Rideout in August. Last month, according to a Reuters report, “authorities in eastern Libya, under the military command of Khalifa Haftar, helped secure the release of an American missionary held hostage by an Islamic State (ISIS) affiliate in the Sahel region of West Africa, escorting him to freedom via Libya”. The agency added that, whilst one source claimed a ransom had been paid, “a high-level source within Haftar’s forces said that a military operation had been carried out in Mali to free the hostage”.

The two women were – and perhaps still are – believed to have been held captive by ISIS, the international terrorist group that emerged and rose to prominence in the early years of the war in Syria. During those years, the group took numerous international aid workers and journalists hostage, going so far as to brutally kill many of those for whom no ransom was paid, including the US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and the aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig. Federico Motka, an Italian humanitarian worker, managed to survive and later testified in a US court that he had been beaten, held in solitary confinement and subjected to stress positions during his months in captivity. Like many other European hostages, he was eventually released. It is unclear whether a ransom was paid for his release. Several US and British hostages, however, were killed after their respective governments had gone so far as to threaten to prosecute the victims’ families should they attempt to raise the money themselves.

A study entitled “How Much Bang for the Buck? Exploring the Effects of Ransom Payments on Terrorist Activity in West Africa”, published in October 2025, analysed the short-term effects of ransom payments on subsequent terrorist attacks. By analysing data from 2017 to 2023 relating to kidnappings for ransom carried out by two designated terrorist groups active in the Sahel – Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) and the local affiliate of the Islamic State, the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) – the study found that: “In two cases, following the payment of ransoms to JNIM, there was a short-term increase in the number or intensity of attacks, whilst ISGS activity remained stable. Conversely, in one case involving a prisoner exchange without a ransom payment, terrorist activity decreased”. According to a 2022 Chatham House report, “ISIS obtained tens of millions of dollars from Europeans in exchange for hostages, a sum which, at that time, represented between 3 and 5 per cent of the group’s revenue”. “It could, however, be argued that, for the group, killing hostages proved more advantageous, as it increased its international visibility,” the document continues, whilst at the same time bringing “notoriety and facilitating recruitment to the cause”.