DAKAR (Reuters) – Having slipped undetected into Mali’s capital weeks ago, the jihadis struck just before dawn prayers. They killed dozens of students at an elite police training academy, stormed Bamako’s airport and set the presidential jet on fire.

The September 17 attack was the most brazen since 2016 in a capital city in the Sahel, a vast arid region stretching across sub-Saharan Africa south of the Sahara Desert.

It showed that jihadist groups with links to al Qaeda or Islamic State, whose largely rural insurgency has killed thousands of civilians and displaced millions in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, can also strike at the heart of power.

Overshadowed by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan, conflict in the Sahel rarely garners global headlines, yet it is contributing to a sharp rise in migration from the region towards Europe at a time when anti-immigration far-right parties are on the rise and some EU states are tightening their borders.

According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), the route to Europe with the steepest rise in numbers this year is via West African coastal nations to Spain’s Canary Islands.

IOM data shows the number of migrants arriving in Europe from Sahel countries (Burkina, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal) rose 62 percent to 17,300 in the first six months of 2024 from 10,700 a year earlier, a rise the UN and the IOM have blamed on conflict and climate change.

Fifteen diplomats and experts told Reuters the swathes of territory under jihadist control also risk becoming training grounds and launchpads for more attacks on major cities such as Bamako, or neighboring states and Western targets, in the region or beyond.

Jihadi violence, especially the heavy toll it has taken on government troops, was a major factor in a wave of military coups since 2020 against Western-backed governments in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the countries at the heart of the Sahel.

The military juntas that replaced them have since swapped French and U.S. military assistance for Russians, mainly from Wagner’s mercenary outfit, but have continued to lose ground.

“I don’t really see the regimes in Mali, Niger and Burkina holding on forever. Eventually one of them is going to fall or one of them is going to lose a substantial amount of territory, which Burkina Faso already has,” said Caleb Weiss, an editor at the Long War Journal and an expert on jihadist groups.

“Then we’re dealing with a jihadi state or multiple jihadi states in the Sahel,” he said.

Global Terrorism Hotspot

Western powers that previously invested in trying to beat back the jihadists have very little capacity left on the ground, especially since the junta in Niger last year ordered the U.S. to leave a sprawling desert drone base in Agadez.

U.S. troops and the CIA used drones to track jihadists and shared intelligence with allies such as the French, who launched air strikes against the militants, and West African armies.

But the Americans were booted out after they angered Niger’s coup leaders by refusing to share intelligence and warning them against working with the Russians. The U.S. is still looking for a place to reposition its assets.

“Nobody else filled the gap of providing effective air surveillance or air support, so the jihadis are roaming freely in those three countries,” said Wassim Nasr, a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, a think-tank in New York.

A Reuters analysis of data from U.S. crisis-monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) found that the number of violent events involving jihadi groups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger has almost doubled since 2021.

Since the start of this year, there have been 224 attacks a month on average, up from 128 in 2021.

Insa Moussa Ba Sane, regional migration and displacement coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross, said conflict was a major factor behind the increase in migration from the West African coast, with rising numbers of women and families seen along the route.

“Conflicts are at the root of the problem, combined with the effects of climate change,” he said, describing how floods and droughts are both contributing to the violence and driving an exodus from rural to urban areas.

In Burkina Faso, perhaps the worst affected of all, jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a day on August 24 in the town of Barsalogho, two hours from the capital Ouagadougou.

The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) in Sydney said Burkina Faso topped its Global Terrorism Index for the first time this year, with fatalities rising 68 percent to 1,907—a quarter of all terrorism-linked deaths worldwide.

About half of Burkina Faso is now beyond government control, the UN has said, a factor contributing to soaring rates of displacement.

“The two, big veteran terrorist [groups] are gaining ground. The threat is spreading geographically,” said Seidik Abba, president of the CIRES think-tank in Paris, referring to al Qaeda and Islamic State.

A UN panel of experts that monitors the two organizations’ activities estimates that JNIM, the al Qaeda-aligned faction most active in the Sahel, had 5,000-6,000 fighters while 2,000-3,000 militants were linked to Islamic State.

“Their declared goal is to establish Islamic rule,” said Nasr of The Soufan Center.

Jihadists use a mixture of coercion and the offer of basic services, including local courts, to install their systems of governance over rural communities that have long complained of neglect by weak, corrupt, central governments.

“Come with us. We will leave your parents, sisters and brothers alone. Come with us and we will help you, we will give you money,” said a man from Mali, describing his encounters as a teenager with jihadists who attacked his village. “But you can’t trust them, because they kill your friends in front of you.”

The young man fled and made it to the Canary Islands last year before moving to Barcelona. He declined to be identified fearing reprisal attacks on family members still in Mali.

Launchpad Scenario

The jihadi groups operate in different areas, at times fighting each other, though they have also struck localized, non-aggression pacts, reports by UN experts say.

The groups receive some financial support, training and guidance from their respective global leaderships, but also collect taxes in areas they control and seize weapons after battles with government forces, the reports say.

European governments are divided on how to respond to the conflict. Southern European nations who receive most migrants favor keeping communication with the juntas open, while others object because of human rights and democracy concerns, nine diplomats in the region told Reuters.

One African diplomat said the EU needed to remain engaged as the issue of migration was not going to go away.

Even if Europe were to agree a shared approach, it lacks the military capacity and political relationships to help because the Sahelian countries don’t want Western input, the diplomats said.

“We do not have any influence in those countries on extremist groups,” said General Ron Smits, head of the Dutch Special Forces.

The other major worry for Western powers is the potential for the Sahel to become a base for global jihad, like Afghanistan or Libya in the past.

“All these violent extremist organizations do have aspirations of attacking the United States,” General Michael Langley, head of U.S. Africa Command, told reporters this month.

Other officials and experts, however, say the groups have not declared any interest in carrying out attacks in Europe or the United States as yet.

Will Linder, a retired CIA officer who runs a risk consultancy, said the attacks in Bamako and Barsalogho showed that efforts by the juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso to shore up security were failing.

“The leadership of both countries really need new strategies for countering their jihadist insurgencies,” he said.