Twenty-five years after 9/11, much of the world has moved on from the war on terrorism. Following the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Washington has turned to other major concerns; along with many of its European allies, the United States has been more preoccupied with the growing confrontation with China, and with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, than with the threat of transnational extremism. Buttressing this shift has been a general decline in terrorist attacks in many parts of the world since ISIS’s peak, in the mid-2010s.
Yet there is one region of the world where terrorism not only persists but also appears to be growing. According to reports by the United Nations and the Global Terrorism Index, Africa is the overwhelming center of terrorist activity today. The African continent accounts for more than 50 percent of all global terrorism-related deaths over the past five years. It also hosts three of the four deadliest jihadi groups in the world: ISIS, which is now primarily based in Africa, Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), and al-Shabab. (The fourth is Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, also known as the Pakistani Taliban.) Six of the ten countries that are most affected by terrorism are also in Africa: Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Somalia. And whereas the Middle East has had a 93 percent decline in terrorist attacks between 2017 and 2025, the Sahel has experienced a 17 percent growth over the same period, with a record 4,043 terrorism deaths in 2023 alone.
To the extent that African terrorism has attracted global concern, much of the attention has focused on the Sahel region. The broad swath of land separating the Sahara and the Maghreb in the north from sub-Saharan Africa is a hotbed of extremism, hosting JNIM and ISIS affiliates such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad, as well as bandit groups such as Lakurawa in Niger and Nigeria and al-Shabab in Somalia. But terrorist activity in Africa now extends to a host of other countries in western, central, and southern Africa as well, including Benin, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, and Togo. Many of these countries have little previous history of jihadi ideology or extremist violence.
World leaders overlook this continent-wide terrorist threat at their own peril. Not only have terrorist groups become a major challenge to African stability and development; they also pose a growing danger to global security. For now, these groups may appear to have little capacity to project their power beyond Africa’s borders. Yet amid the new scramble for Africa’s mineral resources—and for influence on the continent—this may change. Global powers, especially China and Russia, have been increasing their efforts to gain economic, political, and military leverage in Africa, which has in turn undermined collective international initiatives to fight terrorism. And many African jihadi groups themselves have strong anti-Western sentiments and have been using the resource wars to help build transnational networks.
Thus far, the global response to the African threat has largely focused on military operations, especially in the Sahel. But to truly address the phenomenon, outside powers and world leaders will need to understand the underlying forces that have led to this proliferation of extremist groups. Above all, they will need to find new ways to help African countries address the erosion of state institutions and governance that has made terrorism endemic across the continent.
NEGLECTED YOUTH
Africa’s entanglement with terrorist and jihadi groups is hardly new. Al-Qaeda’s 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi were planned from Sudan, where Osama bin Laden had been based between 1991 and 1996. After 9/11, security experts viewed those attacks as a crucial precursor that should have set off alarm bells. Then, in the early years of the twenty-first century, local African groups coalesced into al-Shabab, based in Somalia, which also began to pursue transnational terrorism as an affiliate of al-Qaeda. Later, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb formed a major foothold in Mali. These developments prompted a number of Western-led antiterrorism campaigns, often supported by African forces. Most notable were the military interventions in the Sahel led by the French and other Western special forces and the initial U.S.-supported intervention force in Somalia, the so-called Somali Warlord Alliance.
But these counterterrorism operations did little to stop extremist activity in Africa. In the 2010s, countries in and close to the Sahel began to transition from being breeding grounds of terrorism to becoming the focus of terrorist attacks. Over the past few years, these countries have not only continued to be the places where terrorist groups can organize, radicalize their adherents, and spread violent extremist ideology; they also now bear the brunt of terrorist attacks and killings and the instability and breakdown in security that go with them. Worse, this activity has spread to new areas of the continent, such as Benin, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique, where there had not been jihadis previously. In these countries, terrorist groups have capitalized on long-standing popular grievances spurred by government neglect, exclusion, and poverty. The jihadi expansion has been led by new local groups with connections to al-Qaeda and its branch JNIM in the Sahel region of West Africa and to ISIS affiliates in central Africa, whose major motivations include generating wealth from illegal mining, smuggling, and transnational organized crime.
What the outside world has often failed to recognize—both in the earlier and more recent phases of extremism—are the underlying factors that have made so many African countries prone to this activity. In nearly every case, fragile or collapsing state institutions have been crucial enablers: states’ inability to ensure the welfare and security of their citizens, to exercise sovereign authority over the length and breadth of their territory, and to alleviate the widespread poverty, unemployment, and disease that have created openings for extremism. In many countries, these factors have been exacerbated by large numbers of internally displaced persons and refugees, a lack of social infrastructure, and perennial violent conflict.
The unique characteristics of African demography have added to the challenge. In contrast to the aging populations of most other regions of the world, people under the age of 30 make up nearly 70 percent of Africa’s population and are also most affected by state failure. Large numbers of young people are not in school—more than 270 million African children in 2026, accounting for more than 40 percent of the global total. Nigeria alone has nearly 20 million youth out of school, the highest of any country in the world. At the same time, youth unemployment has remained persistently high: the continental average is 18 percent, but in some countries, such as Djibouti, where mass employment opportunities are limited and young people generally lack the requisite education for skilled employment in the logistics and transport sector that dominates the economy, youth unemployment may reach more than 75 percent. Disaffected young Africans constitute a huge reservoir of potential recruits for extremist groups, which have grown commensurately: according to recent estimates, al-Shabab has more than 15,000 fighters and JNIM has around 6,000.
But state complicity also plays a role. It is now well documented that political leaders have been building ties to bandit and terrorism groups to secure and consolidate their power. For example, the emergence of Boko Haram and various other militant outfits in Nigeria has been abetted by state governors and influential politicians employing them to intimidate opponents during elections. It is worth noting, as well, that elites in Muslim-dominated northern Nigeria initially opposed the U.S. designation of Boko Haram as a terrorist group—based on the assumption that the group was defending the interests of mainstream Muslims and northerners. This kind of support helped legitimize the group and enabled it to extend its control beyond the northeast of the country. The adoption of sharia law in the early years of the twenty-first century by 12 predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria also helped incubate Boko Haram. In this sense, Nigeria followed the path of Sudan, whose long history of Islamic fundamentalism and practice of sharia law made it a safe haven for bin Laden as he began to build his ideology of global terrorism.
Yet another contributing factor has been climate change and natural resource wars. Many of these countries have difficult desert geographies and have been beset with growing food insecurity and conflicts over diminishing resources. The result has been the emergence of so-called ungoverned territories within a number of African countries—areas characterized by power vacuums, porous borders, and illicit mining of critical minerals and other natural resources by terrorist groups, bandits, and criminal gangs. Often in these places, parallel state structures have been established by nonstate actors—not only to provide public goods, including safety, protection, and social services but also to challenge state legitimacy through sectarian uprisings and war. As these extremist nonstate groups seek to root their ideologies in ethnic, religious, and communal identities, territorial control has become central to their goals. This is especially true of jihadi groups such as al-Shabab, Boko Haram, JNIM, and ISIS affiliates, which aim to create caliphates, although none has thus far demonstrated the capacity to take over an entire state.
OUT OF AFRICA
Although the domestic sources of African terrorism are important, external factors and global interconnections have been even more crucial to its spread. Take the continent’s jihadi and radical Islamist movements, which have for decades been inspired and supported from outside. For example, the 1979 Iranian Revolution spurred the rise of Shiite movements among Muslim youths across Africa. The Iranian government actively supported the movements by sponsoring the establishment of schools and mosques, offering scholarships for students to study in Iran, and creating training and indoctrination programs. Today, Ibrahim al-Zakzaky’s radical Islamic Movement of Nigeria, whose goal is to overthrow the secular government and establish Islamic law, remains one of the more resilient Iranian affiliates in Africa and has training camps in northwestern Nigeria that are linked to Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
In the 1990s, the exploits of the Taliban in Afghanistan inspired young Muslim radicals in northern Nigeria, where the forerunners of Boko Haram initially called themselves the Taliban. In turn, terrorism researchers have identified Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other Middle Eastern powers as funders of Salafi extremism, which espouses the violent imposition of Islamic law on everyone, including fellow Muslims. Such is the success of these efforts that many African terrorist groups today consider themselves part of the global network of Salafist jihadism.
Among the most important external forces driving African terrorism are porous borders and the free flows of weapons, drugs, money, and human trafficking into and out of the continent. These flows have facilitated the integration of African groups into transnational terror networks. Al-Shabab was one of the earliest examples of this phenomenon: the group was founded by Somali supporters of the Afghan mujahideen in the late 1980s. Later, it became an affiliate of al-Qaeda, pledging allegiance to the group in 2012.
World leaders overlook this continent-wide terrorist threat at their own peril.
Other African groups followed a similar trajectory. Al-Qaeda’s African affiliates have grown to include Ansaru, a splinter faction of Boko Haram operating in northern Nigeria, as well as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which is based in Algeria. ISIS has added a panoply of African groups to its own network, such as Islamic State Sahel Province in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, and Islamic State West Africa Province, which is active in the Lake Chad Basin. And it has developed ties with Islamic State Central Africa Province, which also operates in parts of Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda; and Islamic State in Somalia, which is a rival of al-Shabab. Meanwhile, al-Shabab has cultivated links to the Houthis in Yemen, a development that has heightened the potential for transnational terrorism to become enmeshed in the struggle for control of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden between Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey following conflicts and closures in the Strait of Hormuz.
These transnational affiliations have offered African groups many advantages, bringing new sources of funding, new weapons (including drones), and training in suicide bombing and IEDs, as well as indoctrination, foreign fighters, intelligence, and logistics. In return, African terrorist groups have helped their international affiliates by engaging in sea piracy and smuggling, human trafficking and migrant smuggling, money laundering, kidnapping for ransom, robbery, livestock rustling, drug trafficking, and illegal mining. African groups use many of these activities, as well as illegally taxing the areas under their control, to raise illicit funds for their international affiliates.
In addition, African jihadis provide personnel for international operations—al-Shabab members have been involved in terrorist training operations in the Philippines—and safe havens for fugitive terrorists. During the decades of the post-9/11 war on terrorism, there was a steady influx to Africa of foreign terrorists, fighters, and instructors who were fleeing Iran, Iraq, Syria and other parts of the Middle East. Others came from North Africa, especially following the civil war in Libya and unrest in Algeria. These foreign extremists brought with them massive amounts of weapons and helped turn Africa into a center of terrorist activity. As the epicenter of global terrorism today, Africa now houses numerous al-Qaeda and ISIS operatives, a fact that increases the risk that Africa-based groups may be planning operations beyond the continent.
MORE MINERALS, MORE MILITANTS
In theory, international engagement in African security should help contain the rising terrorism threat. But the record thus far is not promising. During the war on terrorism, the United States, the EU, the United Nations, and international security organizations provided support for numerous counterterrorism campaigns on the continent. These efforts included backing the G5 Sahel—a counterterrorism initiative by Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger—as well as support for regional counterterrorism initiatives, including in Mozambique and Somalia, as well as the Multinational Joint Task Force, which aimed to combat terrorism in the Lake Chad region. Most of these efforts failed or were not sustained long enough to change the trajectory, and the worsening security situations that they left in their wake fueled anti-Western sentiment. And now, with Russia and China pursuing interests of their own in many parts of Africa, involvement by outside powers is often driven by a desire for strategic minerals and a quest for geopolitical influence, interventions that have only further encouraged terrorist activity.
In the Sahel, the withdrawal of U.S. and French forces between 2022 and early 2025 created power and security vacuums. Russia has quickly exploited the situation, using bilateral defense pacts and mercenary and Africa Corps forces to gain access to minerals and natural resources that France had previously controlled. Indeed, in many parts of Africa, global competition for critical minerals has become a new driver in the spread of terrorism. In the Manono district of Congo, for instance, American, Australian, and Chinese firms are enmeshed in long-running disputes over lithium deposits, which has made counterterrorism operations in the same area more difficult: the various international players no longer want to coordinate on counterterrorism and terrorist groups are using external rivalries to strengthen their own operations. A similar scenario is playing out in other resource-rich areas.
It is now urgent that leading world powers adopt a different approach. A first step is to recognize the problem for what it is. Jihadi terrorism today is not a local or regional problem afflicting a handful of African countries; it is a worldwide threat. It can be effectively tackled only through concerted and sustained international action. Although internationally-backed counterterrorism efforts by the African Union and other regional forces are more needed than ever, the new scramble for resources has become an obstacle to international collaboration in Africa. In this regard, it will be crucial to embrace the common protocols and regulatory frameworks for critical minerals and other resources being developed by the AU and other regional African organizations—which seek to reduce the scope for illicit activities and ensure that that the countries benefit more from the resources through more inclusive and accountable governance structures.
Most important, outside powers need to engage with the root causes that have made the continent so prone to terrorist activity, even when it has been effectively countered elsewhere in the world. As the former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in 2015, “Good governance is what will kill terrorism.” Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement—whose institutional reforms such as power sharing, human rights protections, and community policing proved to be more effective than military operations—is a case in point; so is the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC, which included governance reforms in previously neglected parts of the country as part of its stabilization measures.
The United States as well as governments in Europe and international bodies need to shift their focus from military operations to addressing the actual social and economic sources of state fragility that have made so many African countries fertile ground for conflict and extremist violence. This would of course involve strengthening state capacities, and it would require regional efforts as well as more targeted development assistance. None of it will be easy, but doing nothing would be far worse. Unless African countries and their international partners can begin to address the underlying dynamics that are driving Africa’s transnational terrorism problem, it is unlikely to stay in Africa for much longer.
Loading…
Source: www.foreignaffairs.com
