The Islamic Terrorist Conquest of West Africa
27th May 2026
The widened scope and quickened pace of the Islamic State’s military operations in the Sahel region — just below North Africa, roughly from Senegal to Sudan — threatens to alter the strategic orientation of the African continent. Efforts at countering terrorist operations in the Sahel, such as they were, have evidently failed. As all roads to Mali’s capital of Bamoko are now blocked, that country might be the first state to “go under.”
On April 25, during a coordinated attack on several Malian cities, Muslim terrorists killed the country’s Minister of Defense. The terrorists then drove the Malian Army and its allied Russian mercenaries out of the country’s north.
The military juntas ruling Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have proven themselves as ineffective at combatting Islamic terrorist operations as the democracies that they overthrew. The increasing terrorist assaults across the Sahel and the jihadists’s determined efforts to take over Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have eroded the sovereignty of these states.