Special Analysises

The End of the Sahelian Anomaly: How the Global Conflict between the Islamic State and al-Qa`ida Finally Came to West Africa

After the emergence of the Islamic State in the Sahel (or the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara) in 2015, the group existed in an uneasy alliance with al-Qaida’s various franchises in the region. Proving to be an exception to the rule that al-Qaida and the Islamic State fight each other in whichever territory they co-inhabit, the Sahel was for several years spared from such jihadi-on-jihadi fighting, in part because of personal relationships between jihadis in the rival groups. However, in recent months, this trend has been bucked by fighting between the two jihadi forces in Mali and Burkina Faso. As the two forces expand in the Sahel, a number of factors explain the growing tensions between the two sides, including the hardening of ideological divisions, pressure from Islamic State Central for its regional satellite to take on a more confrontational approach toward its rival, and tensions created by the growing ambition of the Islamic State affiliate in the Sahel.

Two databases maintained by the authors shed light on the nature and scale of the threat posed by jihadi prisoners and prison leavers. Drawing from a database on terror activity in Europe, a new qualitative analysis of 12 alleged terrorist plots or attacks in Europe involving jihadi prisoners and prison leavers helps explain the nature of the threat, finding that both those thwarted in their attempts to participate in foreign terrorist fighting and those who returned from actually doing so were—from this limited sample—commonly involved in such attacks. This often manifested itself in specifically targeting the police or prison guards.