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By Joseph Siegle and Wendy Williams
March 7, 2023
The spike in militant Islamist group violence in Africa has been marked by a 68-percent increase in fatalities involving civilians, highlighting the need for more population-centric stabilization strategies.
Militant Islamist violence in Africa set new records for violent events and fatalities this past year. This continues a relentless decade-long upward trend. To give a sense of the accelerating pace of this threat, both violent events and fatalities have almost doubled since 2019.
There were 6,859 episodes of violence involving militant Islamist groups in Africa in 2022, a 22-percent increase from the previous year. Fatalities linked to these events shot up 48 percent to 19,109 deaths.
This spike in violence was marked by a 68-percent increase in fatalities involving civilians, highlighting the heavy costs incurred by noncombatants. This figure is significant as it indicates these militant groups are not focused on winning hearts and minds so much as intimidating local populations into compliance.
The expanding nature of this threat calls for a more comprehensive and contextualized response that integrates the efforts of local communities with those of national, regional, and international actors.
Violence Concentrated in Sahel and Somalia
The militant Islamist threat is not monolithic but comprised of over a dozen different militant groups. Each has distinct leadership, objectives, organizational structure, funding, and supply of weapons.
They are motivated by a host of factors. These include religious ideology, money, revenge against real and perceived government abuses, criminality, ethnic polarization, and political ambition.
The threat is concentrated in five regions: the western Sahel, Somalia, the Lake Chad Basin, northern Mozambique, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Sahel and Somalia accounted for 77 percent of all such violent events in the past year.
The Sahel—specifically Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—experienced the most rapid expansion of militant Islamist violence of any region over the past year. It accounted for 7,899 deaths, more than 40 percent of the continental total of fatalities. The groups driving this violence are the Macina Liberation Front, Ansaroul Islam, Ansar Dine, and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.
Militant Islamist violence in the Sahel has also been spreading geographically. From a locus in northern Mali, the propensity of violent events has shifted to the more populated regions of central and southern Mali. This includes the capital, Bamako, which has seen attacks on an increasingly regular basis after years of relative insulation.
Militant Islamist violence has similarly spread rapidly into northern, western, and eastern Burkina Faso. Today, Burkina Faso experiences more violent events than any other country in the Sahel.
Once seen as highly unlikely, there is now a real chance that Bamako and Ouagadougou—the capital cities of Mali and Burkina Faso—could fall, fragmenting what little semblance of coherent state structures remain. Both countries have struggled with a breakdown in governance and an acceleration of militant Islamist violence following coups starting in 2020.
The erosion of security in Burkina Faso, in turn, threatens bordering countries, especially Togo and Benin. Both nations saw double digit increases in the number of violent events involving militant Islamist groups in the past year.
In Somalia, fatalities linked to al Shabaab shot up from 2,606 in 2021 to 6,225 in 2022. This 133-percent increase was accompanied by a 29-percent rise in violent events, reflecting an escalation in both the pace and lethality of violence. The tempo of fighting significantly accelerated after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud called for an all-out offensive against al Shabaab. Driven from areas it once controlled, al Shabaab has increased retaliations against soft targets. One example is the October 2022 twin bombings in Mogadishu that killed over 100 people and injured hundreds more.
Indicative of the highly varied nature of threats from militant Islamist groups in Africa, the Lake Chad Basin region (northern Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and southeastern Niger) saw a plateauing of violence from Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa in the past year. However, this obscures a 33-percent increase in violence against civilians. There’s also been a geographic spread of attacks from northeastern Nigeria to regions in the west and center of the country.
In northern Mozambique, violent events linked to Ahlu Sunnah wa Jama’a (ASWJ) rose by 29 percent in 2022. This follows a decline in incidents the previous year after forces from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Rwanda intervened. Dislodged from the coastal cities of Palma and Mocimboa da Praia, ASWJ has shifted its attacks to districts further west and south. ASWJ is notorious for mounting a higher share of violent attacks against civilians than seen in any other region in Africa.
North Africa is the one region that has seen a demonstrable drop in activity over the past year. There’s been a 32-percent decline in violent events. Roughly 90 percent of these incidents, resulting in 276 fatalities, were in Egypt involving the Islamic State in Sinai.