US threatened by new “epicenter of global terrorism” 25 years after 9/11

As the United States prepares to remember the 25th anniversary of 9/11, militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) are gaining ground in one region of the world that receives little attention from Washington.

And it’s not the Middle East.

More than 59,700 people have been killed in Africa‘s Sahel region over the past decade by Islamist militant groups, according to a recent Africa Center for Strategic Studies report drawing on figures from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) monitor. The Institute for Economics & Peace’s latest Global Terrorism Index found the region accounted for more than half the world’s terrorism-related deaths last year.

U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) now assesses Africa to be “the epicenter of global terrorism,” with Al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates active in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin “having the intent to strike the U.S. homeland and our interests,” an AFRICOM spokesperson told Newsweek.

The threat is already spreading. Analysts warn that militant groups are capitalizing on local grievances, battlefield successes and other factors to consolidate and expand their deadly reach.

“The most concerning trend is the continued growth of jihadist groups across West Africa, reflected in their consolidation of territorial influence and their ability to sustain multi-front campaigns across several countries against government forces, local militias, and foreign partner forces, as well as fighting each other in competition for regional dominance,” Héni Nsaibia, ACLED’s senior analyst for the Sahel, told Newsweek.

“Their capacity to mobilize forces for large-scale operations has also become increasingly apparent.”

Al-Qaeda Is Making a Comeback

One group in particular stands out for its ruthlessness and battlefield prowess in the Sahel: Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (“the Support Group for Islam and Muslims”), better known as JNIM. JNIM is affiliated with Al-Qaeda, the same group behind the devastating 9/11 attacks, and it’s only intensified its campaigns in the central Sahelian countries of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, threatening to bring instability to the broader region and potentially beyond.

Nsaibia described JNIM as “unmatched in its use of siege and economic blockade tactics.”

Al-Qaeda has long been an international project, with Africa serving as a historic hub for its activities. Having been founded in the 1980s by Osama bin Laden among Arab volunteers fighting alongside U.S.-backed Afghan mujahideen against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the group established some of its earliest networks in Sudan in the early 1990s, going on to kill more than 200 people in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Liam Karr, Africa team lead for the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, told Newsweek that today “JNIM poses the greatest regional threat, as it already has support networks in the coastal countries neighboring the epicenter of the insurgency in the landlocked Sahelian countries.”

He argued that Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Sahel has primarily focused “on its local struggle and any actor supporting the local Sahelian militaries.”

This campaign involves coordination with other non-state actors such as the Tuareg separatist Azawad Liberation Front, which has recently engaged in major joint assaults alongside JNIM against Malian troops and Russian Africa Corps private military operators.

JNIM has also incorporated or secured ties with a number of other Islamist factions in the Sahel, including Ansarul Islam, Katiba Macina and Katiba Hanifa. Beyond the Sahel, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is active in both North and West Africa, while the al-Shabab militant group operates with Al-Qaeda affiliation in East Africa, primarily Somalia.

“While this may not be translating to major attacks now,” Karr said, “militant groups have repeatedly shown that these support networks can be quickly operationalized for attacks when the group or their local fighters choose to do so.”

ISIS Builds a New Caliphate

But another global jihadi group that seized the spotlight of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East from Al-Qaeda more than a decade ago has also made violent inroads in the region, with aims that stretch far beyond.

ISIS emerged from the remnants of Al-Qaeda in Iraq roughly a decade after the U.S. invasion of 2003, eventually breaking with its parent organization and surpassing Al-Qaeda in forging a sprawling network of affiliates around the world.

As with Al-Qaeda, ISIS has invested heavily in its Africa presence and its supporters across the continent have only ramped up operations in the years since its self-styled caliphate was brought down in Iraq and Syria by local forces and their international partners, including the U.S., Russia and Iran.

In the central Sahel region, the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP), formerly known as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, has emerged as a particularly volatile actor. Compared with JNIM, Karr argued, “ISSP poses a different challenge and presents a greater, if still largely low and nascent, threat to Europe or the U.S.”

“Looking regionally, ISSP is the major group in Niger and has some of these cross-border networks, notably along the Niger-Nigeria border, even if JNIM is largely keeping it from becoming a bigger regional threat and expanding further west,” Karr said.

“However, IS has demonstrated the intent to use ISSP as an external operations node to support the transit of foreign fighters from Europe and attack cells in North Africa and Spanish territories,” he added. “The more ISSP goes unchecked, the more space and resources IS has to use the group to support these external activities.”

There is precedent for ISIS’ Africa outreach exporting bloodshed to the West. Several high-profile ISIS-claimed attacks in Europe can be traced back to African networks, including the Berlin Christmas market truck ramming in 2016 and the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017.

And ISIS has also found success in forging ties with existing organizations. Niger and Nigeria both contend with an overlapping threat posed by an offshoot of the Boko Haram militant group that has proclaimed itself to be the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP or ISIS-WAP).

Further south of the Sahara, ISIS has affiliates in Central Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique and Somalia. Smaller ISIS cells also operate in North Africa, including Libya, Tunisia and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

In Sahelian territories where operations overlap, groups aligned with Al-Qaeda and ISIS are engaged in their own battle of influence. Western Niger has become an especially intense battleground in recent months as JNIM and ISSP both seek to assert their footholds.

Even if the impact of ISIS’ actions remains predominantly felt within these regions for the time being, Nsaibia warned this “does not mean that the external threat can be dismissed.”

“These networks could become more significant if Islamic State were to renew its focus on external operations and successfully leverage them.”

That’s precisely the concern of AFRICOM, which views ISIS’ West Africa affiliate as posing a particularly potent threat beyond the continent.

“ISIS-WAP is ISIS’s largest and most operationally active affiliate globally, and one of their objectives is gaining access to West Africa coasts,” the AFRICOM spokesperson said. “If they, or any terror group, secure access to the coast, they can expand their resources and influence putting more African nations at risk and increasing the chance of threats reaching U.S. shores.”

What Makes the Sahel So Volatile

In ways that echo the situation in Afghanistan in the lead-up to 9/11 and later Iraq and Syria, the central Sahelian states suffer from several underlying factors that cultivate the conditions for the rise of groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Boubacar Ba, a Mali-based researcher at the Center for Analysis on Governance and Security in the Sahel, described the region as “a kind of laboratory” for militant groups to test their experience gained in other zones of conflict such as Syria and Afghanistan, both of which today are led by former Al-Qaeda allies now seeking to root out jihadi presence.

He argued that the primary reason for the emergence of militant groups was the persistent failure of governance, exacerbated by frequent coups, rampant poverty, drug trafficking networks across porous borders and deeply entrenched ethnic divides that have been exploited by Islamist actors to recruit among disaffected populations, particularly pastoralist communities.

“I think the conflict and the crisis will deteriorate more and more in the Sahel region because we do not have the capacity to intervene and to stop it,” Ba told Newsweek.

France tried its hand through military interventions beginning with Operation Serval in 2013 and continuing with Operation Barkhane from 2014, only for backlash to prompt withdrawals from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad between 2022 and 2025.

Since at least 2021, Russia has provided growing security assistance to Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which signed a 2023 defense pact that would lead to their confederation into the Alliance of Sahel States a year later, and the Africa Corps—formerly the Wagner Group—continues to support local forces in their fight against militant groups.

But all have thus far failed to turn the tide, as Ba warned of the “internationalization of the conflict.”

Why the US May Get Involved

With reports emerging in July that President Donald Trump’s administration was considering an intervention in the Sahel, Ba said discussions have taken place on the ground, indicating U.S. interest in achieving a stable environment to strike partnerships involving the region’s critical mineral reserves.

“I think the Trump administration would like to see another solution, not only a military solution, but opportunities for peace, dialogue and mediation,” Ba said. “I think they would like to do it and then help to export the mineral resources.”

“He would like to see how to invest, and to see, in spite of the conflict, in spite of rebellion and insurgency, how to prospect on affluence and business,” Ba added. “It is a big challenge.”

The AFRICOM spokesperson said, “Partnerships and coordination in West Africa remain key to countering the escalating terrorism in the region.” Today, they continued, “coastal West African nations are concerned about the Sahel-based threats and are interested in partnering with the United States.”

The spokesperson pointed to recent evidence of success in the joint U.S.-Nigerian military operation that killed ISWAP leader and ISIS global second-in-command Abu Bilal al-Minuki in May.

​”AFRICOM stands ready to work with capable partners to address shared security threats across the continent, including the Sahel,” the spokesperson said.

William Assanvo, a senior researcher at the Ivory Coast-based Institute for Security Studies, also pointed out that “U.S. involvement in the Sahel would not be new,” dating back to before 9/11 and the ensuing U.S.-led “Global War on Terror.”

Since at least 2000, he said that the U.S. “has been aiming at addressing growing insecurity fueled by violent extremist groups in that region, through training, capacity building, technical assistance, ISR operations, etc.” Assanvo also highlighted the Pentagon’s role in offering logistics and intelligence support to international counterterrorism missions, particularly operations led by France.

Yet, he told Newsweek, “all these have not prevented the threat from becoming more entrenched and further expanding within the Sahel and beyond, endangering regional stability and the very existence of certain countries.”

Instead, he said, “armed groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have established themselves as key players in the security crisis gripping West Africa, the Central Sahel, and the Lake Chad Basin” due to several aggravating factors.

“The groups have demonstrated resilience and an ability to adapt—including to the countermeasures deployed against them,” Assanvo said. “In this regard, they have capitalized on the multiple vulnerabilities (of all kinds—socio-economic, security-related, political, local governance deficits, etc.) characterizing the areas where they have established themselves, operate, or exert influence.”

“Furthermore, the military responses implemented by the countries involved have often proven ineffective, in some cases serving only to exacerbate the situation,” he added. “In the same vein, paradoxically, the military response has contributed to the groups scattering across the Sahel and beyond.”

And while Assanvo asserted that these setbacks did not mean a military element was altogether unnecessary, he argued that any U.S. intervention would need to account for the underlying factors that have fueled the crisis, as well as the political failures that have stunted efforts to combat it.

Otherwise, he warned, Washington risks stoking an even more dire catastrophe.

“Depending on how large or significant [a U.S. intervention] would be and if some U.S. troops on the ground are envisaged, it could also give a new dimension to a situation that so far has mainly been local, national and regional and fuel the existing insurgencies,” he said.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Sam Wilson.