Sahel jihadist attacks on pace to exceed 3,000 in 2026, monitor reports

Record Sahel violence contrasts with global terror deaths at 2008 low

A conflict monitor reports that jihadist violence in Africa’s Sahel region is on pace to exceed 3,000 incidents in 2026, surpassing last year’s total of 2,845 and underscoring how the three-country strip at the heart of the strategic zone has become a centre of jihadi militancy. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, known as Acled, logged 2,145 events involving jihadist groups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger through mid-September. The figures were published as the United States marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, launched by al-Qaida against targets in Washington and New York.

The concentration of violence in the Sahel — even as global terrorism deaths have fallen to their lowest level since 2008 — points to local drivers including poor governance, competition over resources, and endemic instability, with one analyst describing the groups as “very localised,” while the region’s territory has major limitations as a base for campaigns elsewhere.

According to Acled, a non-profit conflict monitor, incidents of violence with jihadist groups present in the three countries have climbed from 63 in 2016 to 2,845 in 2025. If current trends continue in the remaining months of the year, an annual total exceeding 3,000 events appears likely. The trajectory stands in sharp contrast to the global picture: total deaths from terrorism worldwide have fallen to their lowest level since 2008, even as those in the Sahel have risen sharply.

“Terrorism has become more geographically concentrated: the Sahel continued to record some of the world’s highest terrorism death tolls, with the UN recording more than 9,000 deaths from security incidents across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in 2025,” the 2026 Global Peace Index report noted earlier this year.

In April, the al-Qaida-linked group Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) launched a joint offensive in Mali with the Tuareg-dominated rebel group Azawad Liberation Front (FLA). The campaign targeted strategic towns, government forces and their Russian auxiliaries with ambushes, car bombs, drones and raids, inflicting significant casualties. Mali’s defence minister died in a suicide attack on his residence in the garrison town of Kati, nine miles north-west of the capital, Bamako, and the head of military intelligence was killed.

Other attacks hit Mali’s international airport. Rebels seized control of the strategic city of Kidal, a former stronghold of the FLA, after soldiers fled and a force of Russian mercenaries surrendered, reversing a key symbolic victory won by the junta in Mali three years ago. Since then, JNIM has continued to expand the territory under its control, killing additional soldiers and Russian mercenaries in recent weeks and broadening its operations into some neighbouring countries, Acled reported.

In Burkina Faso, JNIM has claimed more than 130 attacks in 2026, striking closer to the capital, Ouagadougou. In Niger, the group claimed at least 17 attacks but remained significantly less active than its rival, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, according to a recent UN report based on intelligence supplied by member states. Much of the violence across the three countries involves fighting with rival groups; the conflict has also included multiple killings by government armed forces and Russian mercenaries.

East Africa remains the other major theatre of al-Qaida-linked militancy on the continent. Al-Shabaab has dominated much of Somalia’s rural areas for years. “In east Africa, al-Shabaab remains one of the continent’s deadliest groups, with Acled recording more than 10,000 reported deaths in al-Shabaab-related violence over the past 18 months,” said Peter Bofin, Acled’s senior analyst for south-east Africa. “Despite some degradation of its extortion in Mogadishu, its revenue streams stretch across the country, and the region.”

Militant groups linked loosely to Islamic State are active in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Chad and Nigeria, where they were targeted by US airstrikes last year.

At its peak in the years after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaida affiliates posed a significant threat to authorities across much of the Middle East, with thousands convinced by the group’s call for a global uprising against the US, Israel and local regimes. Al-Qaida was also able to inspire and direct a series of lethal attacks in Europe that killed hundreds. The continuing expansion in sub-Saharan Africa has been welcomed in al-Qaida propaganda, but experts point out the continent barely featured in the group’s strategic planning until recent years. “Twenty-five years ago it was all about Afghanistan and then Iraq … Africa wasn’t really of interest then. Now it’s the main area of operations,” said Ulf Laessing, a senior analyst at the Konrad Adenauer foundation in Berlin.

Sectarian and ethnic conflict, bitter competition over resources, poor governance, endemic instability and other factors make Africa a fertile ground for Islamic militant recruiters, but territory in places like Mali and Somalia has major limitations as a base for campaigns elsewhere or for long-range terrorist attacks.

The recent UN report described al-Qaida’s senior leadership as “marginalised” and noted that the group’s capability and intent to conduct external operations remained “unclear.” There has been no formal declaration of a successor to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the veteran Egyptian militant killed in Kabul by the US in 2022. Instead, the de facto leader is believed to be 66-year-old Saif al-Adel, who is thought to have been in Iran since 2002 and has yet to make any public statement. Other leaders are likely based in Afghanistan, where the group has been able to rebuild a limited infrastructure, western intelligence services believe.

The most potent al-Qaida affiliate outside Africa remains Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen, which the UN report described as “the vanguard of the global al-Qaida movement” and one of the few affiliates committed to continuing the group’s decades-old campaign against the US. In May, AQAP’s media channels released a new video calling on Muslims in Europe and the US to carry out local attacks and to fight on “behalf of the [Islamic community] in any way possible.” But though AQAP continues to maintain an estimated 2,000 fighters, largely entrenched in the mountains between Abyan and Shabwa, the group’s activity fell by approximately 70%, from 63 events in the first seven months of 2025 to 19 during the same period in 2026, according to Acled.

Experts said JNIM and similar African affiliates have distanced themselves from al-Qaida’s historic objectives of striking the US and its allies. “In the Sahel, Islamic State and al-Qaida now command big areas but these are very localised groups. Not a single attack in Europe or the US has been planned in the Sahel,” Laessing said. Some analysts have contrasted the high numbers of militants currently mobilised by groups such as JNIM and al-Shabaab, which number in the tens of thousands, with the much more limited manpower available to al-Qaida before the 9/11 attacks. Others stress the very different intentions and capabilities of the group now and 25 years ago.