The future of the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria and Iraq seems to be taking shape in Africa. Today, the jihadist central floats in the Levant but extends to Africa, where its subsidiaries value a “Mark” deadly and flourishing.
The official IS weekly, Al-Naba, recently encouraged Muslims to join the continent, before videos from Syria and Iraq congratulate the fighting brothers in Africa.
“The fact that they are calling for joining ISIS in Africa is very significant,” says Damien Ferré, founder of the company Jihad Analytics, which analyzes global jihad. “They recognize that there is no capacity today to pursue the caliphate project (…) but there is really a desire to put marbles on Africa”. In 2021, Al-Naba devoted 28 out of 52 front pages to Africa, he said. Now the majority of IS provinces, 7 out of 13, are based on the mainland.
In a tweet published in early July, Damien Ferré also specified that the Islamic State group had claimed “more than half of its attacks in Africa”.
This year, so far, the Islamic State has claimed more than half of its attacks in #Africa. Iraq still #IS most active province. Peak during Ramadan. Deadliest operations in Afghanistan. Expansion to new areas + upsurge in the attacks at #Christians in Nigeria, Mozambique and DRC. pic.twitter.com/kgPFwzGnGi
— Damien Ferré (@Jihad_Analytics) July 1, 2022
But the experts are unanimous: the African jihad is not the twin of its avatar in the Levant. Its sources are profoundly diverse because they are steeped in local dynamics. And the hypothesis, brandished for a while, of a “Sahelistan” coherent and managed as such, is out of reach. “The African jihad is tinged with something more than radicalism”summarizes Hassane Koné, researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Dakar. “Many people have set foot in the stirrup for reasons that are not necessarily religious”he explains to AFP, citing exclusion, poverty, abuses by the military.
However, “ISIS is capitalizing on the African jihad to continue to exist”. Today, “there are more ISIS fighters of African descent today than Arab,” notes Hans-Jakob Schindler, director of the NGO Counter-Extremism Project (CEP) and ex-UN expert on jihadism.
Djallil Lounnas, researcher at Morocco’s Al Akhawayn University, confirms deliberate IS strategy since 2017 “in the face of the certainty of the fall” of the caliphate. African allegiances to the central are “mutually beneficial : one continues to exist and to give the impression of power, and the latter to benefit from the EI brand”.
In terms of propaganda, the central imposes a visual, a signage, themes in its texts and videos. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), officially linked to IS since 2017, have since aped the methods, according to the journal Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) of the American military academy West Point .
“The ADF started in the summer of 2021 to broadcast beheading videos”demonstrating their desire to “to line up” on “the global mark of IS”, she notes, analyzing in the same way their recourse to suicide attacks. The ADF also experienced, according to the CTC, an influx of fighters from Tanzania, Burundi, Kenya and South Africa. And links have been established with Arab members of ISIS. The Congolese army announced the arrest in a few months of a Kenyan of Omani origin, an Egyptian and a Jordanian. In a propaganda video, we see the first supervising the execution with a machete of a Congolese soldier. The second had apparently been dispatched “to help the group improve its technological capabilities”says the CTC.
Other exchanges are mentioned here and there. Around Lake Chad, for example, mention is made of “Advisors and experts who come to help in difficult times on decisions, reorganizations”explains Vincent Foucher, researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). “There is a circulation of individuals between the Arab jihad and the lake”he argues, but the “logic is more about candor than command”.
But as unstructured as it is, the growth of the EI benefits, in mirror, from the weakness of the fight against terrorism. Rare are the joint actions between States, as between the Congolese and Ugandan armies against the ADF, or as the Rwandan intervention against the IS in Mozambique.
In the Sahel, France is leaving Mali after nine years of counter-terrorism and the UN mission, Minusma, is on hold. “The coordination is bad”says Hans-Jakob Schindler, director of the NGO CEP, who regrets the departure of the French, as the African states seem powerless in the face of the jihadist scourge.