Security Expert Warns UN That Africa Could Become ISIS's Next Caliphate

Martin Ewi stood before the UN Security Council on a Tuesday afternoon with a stark assessment: the Islamic State had metastasized across Africa in ways the international community had largely failed to acknowledge, and the continent now risked becoming the group's next territorial stronghold.

Ewi, who coordinates transnational organized crime research at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria and previously led counter-terrorism efforts for the African Union Commission, laid out the scope of the problem with precision. The Islamic State—known by its Arabic acronym Daesh—now maintained active operations in at least twenty African countries. Another twenty nations served as logistical hubs, places where the group moved money, recruited fighters, and secured resources. These weren't isolated cells. They had become regional power centers, Ewi explained, functioning as corridors of instability that destabilized entire regions.

The geography of this expansion told its own story. The Lake Chad Basin, straddling Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon, had become the group's largest operational theater on the continent. Across the Sahel, certain areas had effectively ceased to function as governed territory. In Somalia, the Islamic State maintained what Ewi called a persistent "hot spot" in the Horn of Africa. The group's Central African affiliate had transformed parts of Congo and Mozambique into what he described, without elaboration, as human slaughterhouses. A recent attempt to destabilize Uganda had failed, but the Islamic State's Democratic Forces affiliate remained a serious threat. The picture was one of relentless expansion, not random violence.

What made this expansion possible, Ewi argued, was a combination of structural vulnerabilities and international neglect. Natural resources across Africa provided funding streams the group could tap. Poverty and the absence of political will to address the Palestinian question created pools of radicalized young people. The Islamic State had proven adept at forming alliances with other terrorist organizations and criminal networks—bandits, pastoral militias, gangs, organized crime syndicates—creating a web of cooperation that transcended ideological boundaries. But perhaps most damaging was what Ewi called the "ostrich approach": countries that ignored early warning signs of terrorist threats, only to call for international help once the situation spiraled beyond control. Benin and Togo, coastal West African nations, were now experiencing concentrated attacks from Daesh and allied groups. Mozambique, Nigeria, Cameroon, and many others had followed the same pattern—threats misdiagnosed, responses inadequate, international intervention arriving too late.

The contrast with the Middle East was stark and deliberate. When the Islamic State seized large portions of Syria and Iraq in 2014, establishing what it called an Islamic Caliphate spanning a third of both countries, the international community mobilized. A military coalition formed. A coordinated strategy emerged. The group was formally defeated in Iraq by 2017 after three years of brutal fighting that killed tens of thousands and left cities in ruins. Yet even in defeat, Islamic State cells continued launching attacks across both countries. But Africa, Ewi pointed out, had received no such coalition. No coordinated international campaign. The continent had been left to absorb the consequences as fighters fled the Middle East and found safe harbor in ungoverned spaces. The vacuum was being filled.

Vladimir Voronkov, the UN's counter-terrorism chief, reinforced the warning. The Islamic State threat had been accelerating since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. Along the Iraq-Syria border, up to ten thousand Islamic State fighters remained operational. In April, the group had launched what Voronkov called a global campaign of enhanced operational activity, designed partly to avenge senior leaders killed in counter-terrorism operations. The momentum was theirs.

Ewi's prescription was comprehensive but uncertain in its prospects. Any strategy to defeat Daesh in Africa, he told the Council, had to move beyond the group itself and target its alliances with al-Qaeda and the criminal networks that sustained it. The Security Council needed to mobilize equipment and funding to strengthen peace support operations across multiple regions. Sanctions against designated individuals and groups needed enforcement. The diagnosis was clear. Whether the international system possessed the will to act remained an open question.