Mapped Out: How the Sahel Became the World's Deadliest Terrorism Hotspot

For three consecutive years, the Sahel has topped global rankings as the deadliest region for terrorism on Earth, a title once held by Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan at the height of their conflicts. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2026, compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the region accounted for over half of all terrorism-related deaths worldwide in 2025, a marker its authors describe as confirming "the epicentre of terrorism has shifted from the Middle East and North Africa, into the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa".

The Sahel has suffered a tenfold increase in terrorism fatalities since 2007, and five of the ten countries most impacted by terrorism worldwide in 2026 sit within it: Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Mali and, further afield, Somalia .

Two Shocks That Broke the Region Open
The Sahel's transformation into a jihadist frontline traces back to a specific convergence of events in 2011 and 2012. The first was NATO's intervention in Libya, which toppled Muammar Gaddafi's regime and released a flood of weapons and heavily armed Tuareg fighters, many of whom had served in Gaddafi's own forces, back into their home regions across the Sahara.

The second was the collapse of the Malian state itself. Returning Tuareg fighters revitalised the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), which launched an offensive in January 2012 that rapidly overran Malian army positions across the north, triggering a coup in Bamako weeks later that removed elected president Amadou Toumani Touré.

The coup, intended to strengthen the state's response, instead weakened it further: jihadist factions including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar Dine and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) sidelined their Tuareg allies and seized Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal outright, imposing sharia law across roughly two-thirds of Malian territory.

France's 2013 intervention, Operation Serval, pushed the jihadist coalition out of Mali's major towns and killed roughly a third of their combined manpower, followed by the longer-running Operation Barkhane and the UN's MINUSMA stabilisation mission. But the groups were degraded, not destroyed. Their remnants regrouped, and in 2017 several of Mali's principal jihadist factions formally merged into Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda affiliate led by veteran Tuareg commander Iyad Ag Ghaly, which has since become, in the assessment of the 2026 Global Terrorism Index, the second deadliest terrorist organisation on the planet.

From its Malian base, the insurgency spread outward: into Burkina Faso from 2015, and into Niger from 2017, exploiting the same conditions of weak governance, porous borders and long-standing local grievances that had allowed it to take root in northern Mali in the first place [8].

From French Withdrawal to Russian Entanglement

The 2020s brought a second rupture. A cascade of military coups Mali in 2020 and 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, and Niger in 2023 installed juntas that broke with France, expelled Western forces and the UN peacekeeping mission, and turned instead to Russia's Wagner Group and its successor, the Kremlin-controlled Africa Corps, for security support.

The three juntas have since formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) and withdrawn from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), fragmenting what regional counterterrorism coordination had existed.

The results have not validated the pivot. Battles involving Russian personnel in Mali fell from 537 in 2024 to 402 in 2025, even as JNIM intensified a campaign of economic strangulation rather than open confrontation imposing a blockade on fuel convoys into Bamako that has held, with interruptions, since September 2025, burning hundreds of tankers along the corridors from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire on which landlocked Mali depends for roughly 95 percent of its fuel.

In April 2026, JNIM went further, launching coordinated attacks alongside the Tuareg-led Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) against multiple Malian cities simultaneously, including Bamako itself, killing the country's defence minister and forcing Africa Corps to abandon Kidal, a city it had spent years and considerable losses recapturing in 2023. JNIM now claims control of roughly 80 percent of the Kidal region.

The United States and United Kingdom have since told their citizens to leave Mali, and observers describe a capital "under siege conditions" even without a shot fired inside the city itself.

A Deadlier, More Concentrated Threat
The regional picture in the 2026 Index is, in one sense, more encouraging than the country-level detail suggests: global terrorism deaths fell 28 percent to 5,582 in 2025, the lowest level since 2007, and deaths and attacks declined across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger individually. But the report's authors caution that this reflects concentration rather than resolution terrorism is now more tightly clustered in fewer, more fragile states than at any point in two decades, with just five countries accounting for nearly 70 percent of global terrorism deaths.

Islamic State and its Sahel affiliates, meanwhile, expanded their operational footprint to 22 countries, and the report documents terrorism spilling southward from the landlocked Sahel states toward the coastal nations of West Africa: Benin recorded a significant rise in terrorism deaths in 2025 and has deployed 3,000 soldiers along its northern border in response .

Why the Region, and Not Just Its Governments, Explains the Trend

Analysts point to structural conditions that predate and outlast any single government's counterterrorism strategy. The Sahel has among the world's highest birth rates, with almost two-thirds of its population under the age of 25, a demographic reality that both strains fragile state capacity and supplies recruits to armed groups offering income, protection or a sense of purpose that the state does not.

Ninety-three percent of all terrorism deaths worldwide in 2025 occurred in countries already experiencing conflict, underscoring that terrorism in the region is rarely an isolated phenomenon but is closely intertwined with weak governance, ethnic and pastoralist grievances, and broader patterns of armed conflict.

The UN Secretary-General, addressing the Security Council in November 2025, warned that the security situation in West Africa and the Sahel was "growing more critical by the day," citing the closure of over 14,800 schools and 900 health facilities across the region as extremist groups expand.

Whether the modest declines recorded in the 2026 Index prove durable will depend less on any single military campaign than on whether the region's governments now operating largely without Western partners and with an uneven Russian security relationship of their own can address the governance vacuum that gave the insurgency its opening in 2012, and that has sustained it in the fourteen years since.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,

International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. ( USIP)

Mustysallama@gmail.com
+233555275880

References
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