From Afghanistan To The Sahel: How Al-Qaeda’s Center Of Gravity Shifted, 25 Years After 9/11 (I)

Twenty-five years after al-Qaeda struck Washington and New York, the organization’s most active theater of operations isn’t in the Middle East or South Asia – it’s in a stretch of West Africa most Americans would struggle to locate on a map. New figures from the conflict monitor Acled show violence linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State-affiliated groups across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger is on track to hit historic highs this year, a trajectory that illustrates both how dramatically jihadist geography has shifted since 2001 and how different today’s al-Qaeda actually looks from the organization that carried out the September 11 attacks.

A Trajectory That Keeps Climbing

The scale of the increase is stark by any measure. Acled recorded 63 incidents of jihadist-linked violence across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in 2016; by 2025, that figure had climbed to 2,845. This year alone has already logged 2,145 events, putting the region on pace for a total well above 3,000 by year’s end if current trends hold. That climb is occurring even as terrorism deaths worldwide have fallen to their lowest level since 2008 – meaning the Sahel isn’t simply part of a broader global surge, but is instead absorbing an increasingly disproportionate share of the world’s terrorism-related violence as other regions see genuine improvement. The 2026 Global Peace Index report captured that concentration directly, noting the Sahel recorded some of the world’s highest terrorism death tolls, with the UN documenting more than 9,000 deaths from security incidents across the three countries in 2025 alone.

A Spring Offensive That Reshaped Mali’s Military Map

The clearest illustration of the region’s deterioration came in April, when the al-Qaeda-linked coalition Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, known as JNIM, launched a joint offensive with the Tuareg-dominated Azawad Liberation Front against strategic towns, government forces, and their Russian military auxiliaries. The offensive combined ambushes, car bombings, drone strikes, and direct raids, and its results were significant by any measure of an insurgent campaign’s effectiveness against a national government: Mali’s defence minister was killed in a suicide attack on his own residence in the garrison town of Kati, just nine miles from the capital, Bamako, and the country’s head of military intelligence was also killed. Separate attacks struck Mali’s international airport, while rebel forces seized the strategic city of Kidal after government soldiers fled and a contingent of Russian mercenaries surrendered – a defeat that specifically reversed a symbolic victory Mali’s military junta had claimed three years earlier, underscoring how fragile recent government territorial gains in the region have proven to be.

JNIM has continued expanding its area of control in Mali since that offensive, inflicting further losses on both government soldiers and Russian mercenaries in recent weeks, while broadening operations into neighboring countries. The group has claimed more than 130 attacks in Burkina Faso this year alone, with operations increasingly striking closer to the capital, Ouagadougou – a worrying trend for a government already struggling to project authority beyond its major population centers. In Niger, JNIM has claimed at least 17 attacks, though it remains notably less active there than its rival, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, according to a recent UN report drawing on intelligence from member states.

A Group That’s Redefined Its Own Ambitions

What makes this expansion strategically distinctive is how narrowly focused it remains. Ulf Laessing, a senior analyst at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, noted that despite commanding substantial territory across the Sahel, groups like JNIM and Islamic State’s regional affiliate function as highly localized operations – not a single attack in Europe or the United States has originated from planning within the Sahel. That’s a meaningful departure from al-Qaeda’s founding strategic vision, and it suggests the organization’s current Sahel expansion is being driven more by regional grievances, governance failures, and local power vacuums than by any renewed global jihadist campaign against Western targets.

A parallel dynamic is playing out in East Africa with al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s other major sub-Saharan affiliate, which has dominated large portions of rural Somalia for years. Peter Bofin, Acled’s senior analyst for south-east Africa, described al-Shabaab as remaining one of the continent’s deadliest groups, with more than 10,000 reported deaths linked to al-Shabaab violence recorded over just the past 18 months. Even where the group has faced setbacks – Bofin noted some degradation of its extortion operations in Mogadishu specifically – its broader revenue streams continue extending across Somalia and the wider region, suggesting territorial or tactical losses in one area haven’t meaningfully constrained the organization’s overall financial and operational reach.

to be continued