The first state to be ruled by Al Qaeda might not be in Afghanistan or the Arab world—and its ruler might be a former whiskey-drinking rock star. In April, the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims ("JNIM" in Arabic) led an uprising in the African nation of Mali, killing Defense Minister Sadio Camara, breaking open a prison holding thousands of inmates, and besieging Bamako, the capital. The fighting was still underway as of August.
Mali is not the only place threatened by a JNIM takeover. The West African branch of Al Qaeda is active in a belt of countries known as the Sahel. Its leader, Iyad Ag Ghali, was the former percussionist for the rock band Tinariwen. He now leads a campaign to stamp out the "music of Satan." Perhaps the one saving grace for Sahelian metalheads is that puritans can't get along with each other: The JNIM is locked in a war with the rival Islamic State Sahel Province.
The Sahelian civil wars are a testament to the failure of the global war on terror. Despite spending $355 billion on African counterterrorism from 2001 to 2021, the U.S. government has been unable to stop Al Qaeda or related Islamist groups from taking root across the continent. A study by the Pentagon's Africa Center for Strategic Studies found a 101,300 percent increase in terrorism fatalities from 2002 to 2022, mostly concentrated in the Sahel and Somalia.
These wars demonstrate that the solution to terrorism isn't maximum violence. President Donald Trump launched four times as many airstrikes against Somalia in his first 18 months of his second term as the U.S. did over the past four years combined. U.S. military aid has flowed to repressive governments across Africa with little respect for their citizens' rights. Since 2020, there have been coups d'etat across the Sahel by military men promising that they can do the dirty work that civilian leaders are afraid of. Many of them were trained by the U.S. government. The new regimes have imported Russian mercenaries with a reputation for brutality and no real restraints on their activities.
"People need to forget about the question of democracy," Ibrahim Traoré, leader of Burkina Faso, declared in April.
Instead of restoring order, these heavy-handed tactics have caused more chaos. The military juntas in the Sahel are plainly losing to the JNIM. While the Russian fighters have no difficulties massacring civilians or mutilating prisoners, they have found it much harder to face people who can actually shoot back, facing repeated battlefield humiliations. Meanwhile, the U.S.-led campaign against al-Shabab, the Somali branch of Al Qaeda, has stalled out despite the heavier use of airpower.
The African war on terror began shortly after the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. To some extent, the U.S. created the very threats that it is trying to fight in Africa. Somalia had been at civil war since the fall of socialism, and in the early 2000s, the CIA began funding Somali warlords to stop the rise of Islamist revolutionaries. The (relatively moderate) Islamic Courts Union took over anyway in 2006—uniting Somalia for the first time in more than a decade—and the U.S. encouraged neighboring Ethiopia to invade. When al-Shabab emerged to fight the Ethiopian invaders, the U.S. tapped a former leader of the Islamic Courts Union to lead a new Somali government.
Soon after the Ethiopian-Somali war, President George W. Bush created the Pentagon's Africa Command, and Congress budgeted $500 million in aid to militaries in the Sahara Desert and the Sahel. At the time, the main Islamist threat to that region was a mostly defeated insurgency in Algeria.
But the Libyan civil war in 2011 created terrible new monsters. Soon after President Barack Obama intervened in support of the Libyan revolution, weapons and hardened fighters from Libya flooded the ethnic Tuareg region of Mali, which declared independence a few months later. Soon after, Al Qaeda and its affiliates took over the Tuareg rebellion. With the Malian government coming close to collapse, France intervened in January 2013 and made many of the same mistakes that the U.S. did in its own war on terror.
Ag Ghali, the current leader of the JNIM, got his start as a Tuareg nationalist. A leaked U.S. embassy cable from 2008 called him a "proverbial bad penny" who enjoyed "playing both sides" and had ties to Islamist and secular nationalist rebels. By the time of the French intervention, he was fully committed to Islamic theocracy. In 2017, he united Islamist rebels across the Sahel under the banner of Al Qaeda. That same year, four U.S. Special Forces troops were killed in Niger by the Islamic State group, which was busy uniting Ag Ghali's rivals.
Despite the failures of the Sahelian governments to stop Ag Ghali—and their willingness to ally with Russia—the Trump administration is eager to double down on supporting them. The U.S. government increased intelligence sharing with Mali in 2025, and as of July it was considering a direct military intervention against the JNIM, according to The Washington Post. But every American escalation on the continent has produced the enemy that the next one had to fight.
The post America Is Spending Billions To Fight the War on Terror in Africa. The Terrorists Are Winning. appeared first on Reason Magazine.