UN warns Africa risks becoming Islamic State's next caliphate

Martin Ewi stood before the United Nations Security Council on a Tuesday with a stark assessment: the Islamic State had metastasized across Africa in ways that demanded urgent international attention. The extremist group, also known as Daesh, had expanded its footprint far beyond what most observers realized, Ewi explained. At least twenty African nations were now experiencing direct Islamic State activity. Another twenty or more were being used as logistics hubs—places where the group moved money, recruited fighters, and secured resources without drawing the kind of firepower that had devastated their operations in Syria and Iraq.

Ewi, who coordinates a transnational organized crime project at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria and previously led counterterrorism efforts for the African Union Commission, painted a picture of a continent becoming a patchwork of extremist strongholds. The Lake Chad Basin, bordered by Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon, had become the group's primary operational theater. Across the Sahel, entire regions had slipped beyond government control. In the Horn of Africa, Somalia remained a critical flashpoint. The group's affiliate in Uganda, the Allied Democratic Forces, had recently attempted to destabilize the country and continued to pose a serious threat. In Central Africa, the Islamic State had turned parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique into what Ewi called human slaughterhouses—a clinical term for systematic brutality.

The contrast with the international response to the Islamic State in the Middle East was striking. When the group seized large portions of Syria and Iraq in 2014, establishing what it called an Islamic Caliphate spanning a third of both countries, the world mobilized. A military coalition formed. For three years, the fighting was relentless and devastating—tens of thousands killed, cities reduced to rubble. By 2017, the group was formally defeated in Iraq, though its cells continued launching attacks across both nations. But when those same fighters and their ideology migrated south to Africa, no equivalent coalition assembled. No coordinated military campaign. No sustained international pressure. The continent was left to absorb the consequences of extremists fleeing the Middle East and finding safe harbor in ungoverned spaces.

Ewi identified several conditions that had made the Islamic State so effective in Africa. Natural resources provided funding streams. Poverty and the unresolved Palestinian question created pools of radicalized youth. The group had proven adept at forming alliances with other terrorist organizations and criminal networks—bandits, pastoral militias, gangs, organized crime syndicates. Many African governments had either ignored early warning signs or responded inadequately when threats finally became impossible to deny. Benin and Togo, coastal nations that had long seemed insulated from the violence ravaging their neighbors, were now under sustained attack. Mozambique had experienced a similar trajectory: early warnings dismissed, then sudden eruption. Nigeria, Cameroon, and many others had followed the same pattern—misdiagnosis followed by insufficient response.

Vladimir Voronkov, the UN's counterterrorism chief, added his own warning to the Council. 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 fighters remained operational, using the region as a base to launch what the group called a global campaign of enhanced operational activity—a euphemism for coordinated attacks meant to avenge senior leaders killed in counterterrorism operations.

Ewi's prescription was clear but demanding. Any strategy to defeat the Islamic State in Africa had to extend beyond the group itself. It had to target their alliances with Al-Qaeda and criminal networks. It had to address the underlying conditions—poverty, weak governance, unresolved grievances—that made radicalization possible. The UN Security Council needed to mobilize equipment and funding for peacekeeping operations across multiple regions. Sanctions against designated individuals and groups had to be enforced. Early warning systems had to be taken seriously. The alternative, Ewi suggested, was watching Africa become what the Islamic State had already attempted in the Middle East: a caliphate, a territorial stronghold, a base for global operations. This time, there would be no international coalition to stop it.