Last update: 2025-01-21 14:59:43
Since 2003, Africa’s Sahel region has witnessed significant jihadist activity. Meanwhile, new and mostly non-violent Muslim voices ask for a greater role in politics and policy. A few of these voices belong to ‘Islamists’ who seek to build Islamic States, but the majority are Muslim activists hoping to expand and define the place of Islamic values in public life.
Sahelian governments and societies face the challenge of responding to these new, broad-based Muslim movements, seeking to ‘mediate social change’[1] while at the same time drawing distinctions between those movements and the fringe of violent jihadists. Amid urbanization and unsettled questions of a national character, the politics of Muslim identity in the Sahel are growing ever more complex and urgent.
Jihadist groups in the Sahel represent both homegrown movements and organizations that expanded out of North Africa. Lines between outsiders and insiders are blurry. The Algerian-born al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) turned to the Sahara after its brutality alienated civilians during Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s, and after the group found itself on the margins of the amnesties and political settlements that (mostly) ended the civil war in the early 2000s. AQIM has worked to implant itself in Saharan societies through preaching, commercial ties and intermarriage, and by taking seriously the grievances of local populations, such as Mali’s irredentist Tuaregs.
The line between ‘foreign fighters’ and local militants also blurs when jihadists cross borders with ease. One example is Hamada Ould Khairou, a Mauritanian born c. 1970. Khairou was imprisoned in Mauritania for several months in 2005-2006 after his involvement in a violent incident at a mosque. He escaped to Mali and fought alongside the AQIM leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar before Malian authorities imprisoned him in 2009. Khairou was reportedly released as part of a prisoner exchange for a French hostage in 2010. He resurfaced in 2011 as a founder of the AQIM offshoot, the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA), one of the groups that dominated northern Mali during that country’s crisis in 2012-2013. Such checkered, transnational careers are common to jihadist leaders in the Sahel.
Kidnappings, Occupations and Raids
Jihadism in the Sahel has taken three major forms, all of which capitalize on porous borders, the state’s incapacity and corruption. First, jihadist groups, especially AQIM, have built a lucrative kidnapping economy. According to an investigation by the New York Times, European governments paid at least $91.5 to AQIM for the release of European hostages between 2003 and 2014.[2] Several armed rescue attempts ended in disaster, and AQIM has executed hostages when governments refuse to pay ransoms. Meanwhile, some evidence suggests intermittent complicity, especially in pre-crisis Mali, between corrupt local officials, shadowy intermediaries and kidnapping outfits.[3]
Second, jihadists have opportunistically seized territory. In northern Mali, the Tuareg separatist National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA) launched a rebellion in early 2012, a sequel to three earlier bids for independence. The ostensibly secular Tuareg rebels captured regional capitals and surrounding areas, but soon lost control to AQIM and two allied groups, a Tuareg-led jihadist organization called Ansar al-Din and the AQIM offshoot MUJWA. This jihadist coalition provoked a worldwide outcry when it attempted to impose its version of the Islamic creed and morality by force: destroying tombs of Sufi shaykhs, amputating the hands of accused thieve, and banning music and sport. Yet the jihadists’ vision of law and order seemed to attract tepid enthusiasm from some locals brutalized by the MNLA’s robbing and rapes.[4] The French-led Operation Serval dismantled jihadist rule in northern Mali in early 2013, but suicide bombings have periodically occurred, and several major jihadist commanders remain at large.
Third, jihadists have conducted raids, often in retaliation for the moves of governments to crush them. Some raids have been dramatic in size and intent: when France launched Operation Serval in January 2013, the one-time AQIM leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar seized over 800 hostages at the Tigentourine gas facility in Algeria. Other raids have protested the Sahelian governments’ foreign policies: AQIM detonated bombs near the Israeli Embassy in Mauritania in 2008 and near the French Embassy in 2009.
Despite periodic alarmist rhetoric from the international media about the growth of jihadism in the Sahel, the fortunes of jihadists there have fluctuated. Although the Sahara and Sahel are in some ways ‘safe havens’ for jihadists, they also confront jihadists with constant risks of detection and death. Jihadists spend much of their time on the run, and even veteran commanders like AQIM’s ‘Abd al-Hamid Abu Zayd, who died in the mountains of northern Mali in February 2013, can find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Force and Conciliation
Sahelian governments have responded to jihadism with both force and conciliation. For example, Mauritania hunted jihadists into Malian territory in 2010 and 2011 and has arrested dozens of suspected jihadists. Yet the administration of the current Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould ‘Abd al-‘Aziz has also organized dialogues where nationally respected Muslim scholars seek to ‘de-radicalize’ imprisoned jihadist suspects. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz has periodically released some prisoners, including the jihadi thinker Mohamed Salem Ould Mohamed Lemine al-Majlissi. Such mixed responses to jihadism reflect the difficult calculations Sahelian leaders must make when domestic constituencies demand both security and free expression.
Sahelian governments also lack the capacity to respond fully to jihadism. Niger is a case in point. With a growing population of over 17 million and a 2012 gross domestic product of only $6.6 billion, Niger is deeply impoverished. Asserting that poverty underlies extremism, Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou has created national programs to reinforce security and development throughout the country. Nigerien forces have claimed some successes against jihadists, such as arresting alleged arms traffickers. Yet three of Niger’s six neighbors – Nigeria, Libya, and Mali – have become sources of refugees and threats, stretching Niger’s security resources thin. Jihadist attacks have highlighted weaknesses: in May 2013, jihadists bombed the northern cities of Arlit and Agadez, and a June 2013 prison break in Niamey freed suspected AQIM and MUJWA fighters. Niger has sought help from Washington and Paris, welcoming American surveillance drones and French special forces.
Niger’s security relationship with Western powers highlights the role of outsiders in attempts to secure the region. Washington devotes greater attention to jihadists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen than it does to the Sahel, but American policymakers have voiced concerns about an ‘arc of instability’ in Africa for a decade. U.S. programs such as the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP, to which all of the western Sahelian countries belong) have sought to increase the security capacities of Sahelian and North African militaries. Following Mali’s collapse, however, critics questioned TSCTP’s efficacy. Paris, meanwhile, perceives vital interests at stake in the Sahel, ranging from the stability of former colonies to French companies’ access to Niger’s uranium. French President Francois Hollande engaged heavily and personally on Sahelian issues in 2013-2014, including increasing French outreach to the region’s Anglophone neighbor, Nigeria.
Nigeria’s own role in the Sahel is complex, as are the roles of two other nearby powers, Algeria and Morocco. Nigeria’s northern States are culturally and religiously part of the Sahel. With its vast resources and population, Nigeria could potentially act as a guarantor of regional security – a role Nigeria played in crises in coastal African countries in the 1990s and 2000s. Yet in the 2010s, internal problems have constrained Nigeria’s leadership and contributed to the Sahel’s woes. A homegrown violent movement, Boko Haram, has sown chaos in northeastern Nigeria, bombed Abuja and Lagos, and perpetrated kidnappings in Nigeria and Cameroon. Nigeria’s security forces have resorted to brutal tactics against civilians and Boko Haram suspects but have failed to stop the movement or anticipate its ever-shifting array of tactics. Sahelian governments fear a spillover of Boko Haram’s violence into their territory. They have found themselves in the position of pressuring Nigerian authorities to do more against Nigeria’s own jihadist problem, rather than receiving decisive Nigerian help in their own struggles.
Algeria and Morocco have also struggled to make decisive contributions to the stability of the Sahel, not least because these two countries have unresolved differences over the status of the Western Sahara, which is claimed by Morocco. This rift has meant that each country pursues its own policy in the Sahel. Algeria, under its ailing President ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Bouteflika, has played an ambivalent role during Mali’s crisis, even as AQIM has periodically resurfaced in northern Algeria.[5] Algeria has fostered regional cooperation (excluding Morocco) through such initiatives as establishing a joint command in the southern Algerian city of Tamanrasset. In 2014 Algeria resumed its historic role as a mediator between the Malian government and Tuareg separatists, but Algeria has continued to decline the full mantle of regional security leader.
Only a fringe of Sahelian Muslims embrace jihadism. Yet Sahelian societies should not be viewed reductively as consisting of two poles – ‘traditional’ and Sufi leaders on the one hand, and Salafis and jihadists on the other. Rather, Sahelian societies are home to increasingly complex webs of Muslim movements
Morocco, meanwhile, has engaged diplomatically and religiously. King Muhammad VI and Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita exchanged visits in 2014, and Morocco has begun ‘training’ Malian imams. Seeking in part to win over sub-Saharan African leaders to its position on the Western Sahara conflict, Morocco has presented itself as a foe of extremism in the region.[6] As Morocco and others compete to shape the Sahel’s religious trajectory, however, new Muslim voices have laid claims to religious leadership.
New Successful Preachers
Only a fringe of Sahelian Muslims embrace jihadism. Yet Sahelian societies should not be viewed reductively as consisting of two poles – ‘traditional’ and Sufi leaders on the one hand, and Salafis and jihadists on the other, with a mass of easily swayed youth in between. Rather, Sahelian societies are home to increasingly complex webs of Muslim movements. Islamists, organized like the Muslim Brotherhood into political machines, are rare in the Sahel outside Mauritania. Yet many of the Sahel’s new Muslim movements seek to dictate public morality. It is in their efforts to mobilize Muslim publics – and, sometimes, in their ambiguous relations with jihadists – that the future of Muslim political life in the Sahel is taking shape.
Muslim associational life has diversified in the Sahel alongside attempts at democratization. Whereas a few official bodies sought to speak for Islam in each country in the 1980s – for example, the Malian Association for the Unity and Progress of Islam, the Islamic Association of Niger, and Mauritania’s Islamic Cultural Association – the last twenty years have seen a proliferation of new groups. In Mali and Niger, Muslim associations and media exploded in the 1990s after military dictators permitted liberalization. In Mauritania, military dictatorship lasted into the 2000s, but the first civilian regime, that of President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi (2007-2008), legalized an openly Islamist party, Tewassoul. In addition to new domestic associations, the Sahel has become a destination for global Islamic charities, which have built mosques, founded schools and conducted preaching.
Across the Sahel, urbanization and population growth have contributed thousands of members to new, often city-based Muslim organizations. A proliferation of urban mosques – sometimes encouraged by the state, as was long the case in Mauritania – has driven a ‘fragmentation of sacred authority’ and allowed new, often young, preachers to compete for followers. The rise of figures like Mauritania’s Shaykh Muhammad al-Hasan Ould Dedew and Mali’s Shaykh Cherif Ousmane Madani Haidara points to how young preachers with mass followings and a well-developed media presence are reshaping the style and substance of Muslim leadership in the Sahel.
What do these new voices want? They have supported the further Islamization of public life and opposed initiatives that are seen as secularizing. For example, Malian Muslim associations joined forces between 2009 and 2012 to successfully block proposed reforms to the country’s Family Code. They negotiated new reforms that did not violate what Muslim activists saw as essential parameters for marriage, inheritance and other issues. In Niger, Muslim associations organized large protests in Niamey and Maradi against the second International Festival of African Fashion in 2000, stating that the festival undermined public morality. In Mauritania, activists associated with Tewassoul objected strenuously to the government’s recognition of Israel in 1999, and their protests likely contributed to the decision to suspend relations a decade later. Sahelian Muslim activists have proven capable of swaying government policy and building widespread public support for some of their positions.
Some new Muslim associations and leaders have had complex relationships with jihadists. Prominent Salafi-leaning preachers such as Mauritania’s Dedew and Mali’s Shaykh Mahmoud Dicko have denounced jihadists and this can undermine the latter’s message. Such preachers have also attempted to engage jihadists in dialogue, sometimes with the blessing or at least acceptance of the state. Dedew helped lead government-sponsored dialogues with imprisoned jihadist suspects in 2010, and Dicko was in contact with the jihadist leader Iyad Ag Ghaly after Mali collapsed in 2012. The fruits of dialogue are not always clear: some of the Mauritanian prisoners who participated in ‘de-radicalization’ later relapsed, and Dicko was unable to broker a settlement with Ag Ghaly. Yet such contacts between activists and jihadists can keep dialogue open even when governments are pursuing harsh measures against jihadists.
There are sometimes areas of gray between Muslim activist movements and jihadist circles. The Malian jihadist Iyad Ag Ghaly, renowned for impiety in his youth, reportedly become more devout and turned toward jihad after contact with missionaries from the global quietist preaching movement Tabligh Jama‘at.[7] Such influences are hard to trace, however. Sahelian governments sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between non-violent preachers and armed jihadists. These difficulties can have serious repercussions: at the height of Mali’s crisis, Malian soldiers killed sixteen unarmed members of Tabligh Jama‘at, a number of them Mauritanians, and provoked tension between the two countries. In Nigeria, Boko Haram’s Muslim critics have not always found a sympathetic reception from the state: the preacher Muhammad Auwal Albani Zaria spoke out against Boko Haram but was arrested in 2011 on charges of aiding the group. Boko Haram assassinated him in 2014.
How Sahelian societies and governments manage the delicate relationships between mainstream Muslim activists, jihadists and the state will have profound consequences for the region’s trajectory. Despite traditions of French-inspired secularism or ‘laïcité’, Sahelian States and politicians have incentives to heed the voices of Muslim activists and to facilitate the constructive participation of these activists in public life while denying jihadists opportunities to recruit.
In the Sahel, populations are growing, climate change is accelerating, and poverty is deepening. On a nearly annual basis, the region faces devastating waves of hunger and drought. Although fears of terrorism dominate headlines and worry policymakers in capitals, the ‘security concerns’ most Sahelians face are related to food and work. Intersecting with this struggle to meet basic needs are the politics of Muslim identity. Peace, and the marginalization of jihadist voices, will require solutions to both the pressing question of how to survive and the question of how to be Muslim.
Essential Bibliography
Lecocq, Baz. Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Brill, Leiden, 2010).
Ould Ahmed Salem, Zekeria. Prêcher dans le désert: islam politique et changement social en Mauritanie (Kathala, Paris, 2013).
Soares, Benjamin. The Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour, 2005).
Sounaye, Abdoulaye. Muslim Critics of Secularism: Ulama and Democratization in Niger (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010).
