Sahel violence hits record highs as al-Qaida, IS expand African operations

A quarter-century after al-Qaida struck New York and Washington, the organization has found its most active theater not in the Middle East but in Africa's Sahel—a vast, contested band of territory stretching across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Violence linked to al-Qaida and Islamic State affiliates in these three countries has exploded from 63 recorded incidents in 2016 to 2,845 in 2025, according to data compiled by Acled, an armed conflict monitoring organization. If the current pace holds through the end of this year, the total will exceed 3,000 events—a historic high that underscores a fundamental shift in where these militant networks now concentrate their power and resources.

The human toll has been staggering. The United Nations recorded more than 9,000 deaths from security incidents across the three countries in 2025 alone. In April, a coordinated offensive by the al-Qaida-linked group Jama'at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, known as JNIM, and the Tuareg rebel faction Azawad Liberation Front targeted government positions, military installations, and Russian mercenary forces with ambushes, vehicle bombs, and drone strikes. Mali's defense minister was killed in a suicide attack on his residence in Kati, a garrison town nine miles northwest of the capital, Bamako. The head of military intelligence died in the same wave of assaults. Rebels seized the strategic city of Kidal after soldiers abandoned their posts and Russian mercenaries surrendered—a reversal of a symbolic victory the Malian junta had claimed three years earlier.

Since that April offensive, JNIM has continued to expand the territory under its control, inflicting additional casualties on soldiers and Russian fighters in recent weeks and broadening operations into neighboring countries. In Burkina Faso, the group has claimed responsibility for more than 130 attacks in 2026 alone, striking progressively closer to Ouagadougou, the capital. In Niger, JNIM has claimed at least 17 attacks, though it remains less active there than its rival, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. Much of the violence involves fighting between these competing militant factions, but government armed forces and Russian mercenaries have also been responsible for multiple killings.

What distinguishes the current Sahel insurgency from al-Qaida's posture in earlier decades is its geographic focus. Ulf Laessing, a senior analyst at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, observed that while Islamic State and al-Qaida now command significant territory in the Sahel, these remain fundamentally localized operations. Not a single attack in Europe or the United States has been planned from the region, he noted. This represents a dramatic departure from al-Qaida's historical strategy. Twenty-five years ago, the organization's strategic planning centered on Afghanistan and Iraq; Africa barely registered as a priority. Now it is the group's primary theater of operations.

The expansion has been enabled by conditions on the ground—sectarian and ethnic tensions, competition over scarce resources, weak governance, and chronic instability have created fertile recruitment ground for militant recruiters. Yet analysts caution that territory in Mali and Somalia, however extensive, carries significant limitations as a base for launching campaigns elsewhere or conducting long-range terrorist attacks. At its peak in the years following 9/11, al-Qaida affiliates posed a direct threat across much of the Middle East and inspired or directed lethal attacks in Europe that killed hundreds. That organization no longer exists in the same form.

Al-Qaida's senior leadership is now described by the United Nations as marginalized. The group has never formally announced a successor to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian militant killed in Kabul by a U.S. strike in 2022. The de facto leader is believed to be 66-year-old Saif al-Adel, who has been in Iran since 2002 and has made no public statements. Other senior figures are thought to be based in Afghanistan, where the group has managed to rebuild limited infrastructure, according to Western intelligence assessments. The most committed al-Qaida affiliate to maintaining the group's decades-long campaign against the United States is Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen and described by the UN as the vanguard of the global movement. Yet even AQAP, which maintains an estimated 2,000 fighters entrenched in mountainous terrain between Abyan and Shabwa, saw its activity plummet by roughly 70 percent between the first seven months of 2025 and the same period in 2026.

The contrast is stark. Groups like JNIM and al-Shabaab, which operates across much of Somalia's rural areas and has killed more than 10,000 people in the past 18 months according to Acled, now command tens of thousands of fighters—far larger forces than al-Qaida could field before 9/11. Yet their intentions and capabilities differ fundamentally from those of the organization that launched the 2001 attacks. The Sahel has become a center of militant activity, but not a launchpad for global terrorism. As the United States marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks that defined a generation's security concerns, the organization responsible has transformed into something geographically vast but strategically narrower—powerful in Africa, but marginal in the world.