Islamic State Plays the Race Card

Al-Naba 448, main editorial, p. 3.

In Mali, on 17 July, a government soldier cut into a corpse and ate the liver, surrounded by his laughing comrades. We know about this because it was filmed and the video swept social media; it was trending on Twitter at one point. The outcry was strong enough that the Malian junta issued a statement saying it had ordered an investigation into this “rare atrocity”. Three days later, the Islamic State (IS) launched a massive assault against government troops in Niger. The casualties are very uncertain, but the column that was ambushed is believed to have contained 200 soldiers, and more than thirty are reported killed.

This might seem like a slightly random way to begin an article, but, in examining the jihadists’ progress in the Sahel, these two episodes can be viewed as cause and effect. Far from official atrocities being “rare”, the Malian military government’s brutality is quite routine and even the incident of cannibalism is not unique; multiple videos of Malian troops eating parts of slain jihadists have emerged in the days since. Nor is Mali an outlier among its neighbours.

Military coups in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), Burkina Faso (January and September 2022), and Niger (July 2023) have brought about a strategic reorientation in West Africa, as French troops deployed to assist local security were expelled by February 2023, and Russian forces have come in to replace them. Russia taking over Imperial responsibilities from France in West Africa had been accompanied by a collapse of the efforts to contain the jihadists

The Western anti-IS mission in Iraq and Syria can be criticised for being too narrowly focused on counter-terrorism, with insufficient attention given to local political realities, resulting in the replacement of the “caliphate” with authorities that lack legitimacy, which risks resetting the cycle of insurgency and instability. To criticise the Russians in these terms would be to miss the point.

As witnessed in Syria, Russia sees little value in stability as an end in itself and is utterly unconcerned about the legitimacy of the ruling order, so long as it is loyal to Moscow. Cementing Russian political influence through client regimes is the purpose of its interventions, even if that means allowing the terrorism problem to get worse. (Creating and exacerbating problems in order to solve them is a venerable Kremlin tradition.) The Syrian template has been repeated in West Africa, and the outcome is the same, the worst combination of savage despotism and chaos, the one feeding the other, as populations seeking security frequently—not unreasonably—prefer to take their chances on the jihadists, rather than the State. Unlike in Syria, however, where Iran’s Shi’a jihadists did the heavy lifting after Bashar al-Asad’s army essentially disintegrated and Russia’s role, beyond providing some air support, was mostly ceremonial, the West African regimes are actually relying on Russia, which is preoccupied with trying to conquer Ukraine. The chance that one or more of the West African juntas falls in the not-too-distant future is very real.

Across Africa, IS operates under the banner of: the “Islamic State West Africa Province” (ISWAP) in Nigeria, once known as “Boko Haram”; the “Islamic State Sahel Province” (ISSP) concentrated in the Liptako-Gourma region (the tri-border area between Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger); the “Islamic State in Somalia” (ISS); the “Islamic State Central Africa Province” (ISCAP) in the Congo; and “Islamic State in Mozambique” (ISM). These should not be seen as separate entities, however. These brands represent at most bureaucratic divisions within one fluid organisation, in the way civil servants in Western States might specialise in one department but regularly collaborate with and move to other parts of the government, and this is true of IS as a whole.

The Islamic State is a unitary global network that shifts resources—including fighters—from front to front, from (and around) Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and back again, as needed. A recent episode highlighting this was the January 2023 killing of Bilal al-Sudani, a Somalia-based IS official, who was found on examination to be the head of Al-Karrar, the office handling the finances for IS’s activities in Somalia, the Congo, Mozambique, and Afghanistan, where IS’s forces are branded as the “Islamic State Khorasan Province” (ISKP). Al-Bilal was also involved liaising with IS’s recruiters in South Africa, and coordinating the transfer of bomb-making equipment and training to the Congo and Mozambique, which has made the jihadist insurgencies in those countries more lethal and effective.

Africa is the theatre where IS has shown the most progress over the last half-decade and more. IS’s massive assault on the Sinaa Prison in Syria in January 2022 got a lot of international attention, but when IS renewed its “Breaking the Walls” campaign to free imprisoned jihadists no later than October 2020, one of its first successes was in the Congo, and a steady tempo of prison-breaks has continued across Africa. An IS prison-break in Niger earlier this month appears to have been organised from inside the prison itself. Replenishing the ranks with skilled and devoted operatives in this way has been important to IS’s insurgent success.

IS’s weekly newsletter, Al-Naba, has had reports of jihadist attacks in Africa on the front page of every issue except one for the last two months and this weighting is not unusual.¹ Al-Naba has been filled with notices of IS military advances in Africa for years, and the African jihad has featured heavily in the output of IS’s official spokesman, including the most recent speech marking a decade since the “caliphate” was proclaimed. The prison-breaks are a theme in this propaganda: IS is very insistent on the duty it owes to imprisoned comrades. Another overarching theme is that IS’s war in Africa is against Christianity, expressed both as glee for IS’s kinetic actions—the massacres of Christian civilians and the burning of their homes—and a bitter ideological sectarianism. IS is as satisfied when it converts Christians to (its version of) Islam as it is when it murders Christian villagers.

Given the scale of the carnage IS has caused and is causing in Africa, it might be wondered why the Western media coverage is so minimal, and IS has an answer.

In Al-Naba 448, published on 20 June, the main editorial, entitled, “Jihad in the Congo”, began:

The raids of the caliphate’s soldiers have not eased in Central Africa against the Christians and their armies in a war that has been raging for years, and yet African Christians do not receive concerned attention in the Western media equivalent to that shown for Christians in the Crusader West. This is a continuation in practice of the era of “racial discrimination” and “white supremacy”, which the Crusader countries are still mired in to this day, despite their claims to the contrary.²

This adoption of concepts and terminology from the Western Left is new for the Islamic State, though it is not new for Islamists. The 1978-79 Iranian Revolution was the work of Communists and Islamists—the unholy alliance of the Red and the Black, as the Shah put it—and that alliance has continued ever since, manifested at the present time in the agitation against Israel on Western streets and campuses orchestrated by a combination of progressive Leftists and overt supporters of HAMAS. Unsurprisingly, the Iranian theocracy has taken a direct hand in bolstering these forces. IS is committed to war against Jews everywhere, but IS opposes the idea that Palestine is special, regarding Muslims who prioritise it over other conflicts and inject the Palestinian issue into all things as being engaged in idolatry. The Naba 448 editorial, therefore, remains focused squarely on Africa.

Al-Naba allows that racism is not the only reason for the “neglect” of the “African jihad”: it is part of an attempt to hide scale and pace of IS’s advances, and to cover up the failure of the world powers to arrest the jihadists’ progress. IS delights in the failure of external actors, namely Uganda and the United Nations peacekeepers, to suppress its forces in the Congo, and gloats that even when Uganda tried cooperating with its old rival, Rwanda, the jihadists still remained.

IS is confident it will continue to withstand its enemies’ attacks because they get distracted with other interests, and their vendettas against each another, while “the soldiers of the Islamic State continue their sublime jihad towards their highest goal: the supremacy of the shari’a”. The efforts to supplement the military operations with a “media [campaign] that aims to distort [the Islamic State’s] image and alienate Muslims from them” have also failed, Al-Naba claims. As to the criticism about trying to create an Islamic State “in an environment where Christians represent an overwhelming majority”, Al-Naba says that such critics simply “do not understand the nature of the deen of Islam” and have not studied Islam’s history.

“What is noteworthy about the mujahideen’s war against their enemies in Central Africa is that it resembles closely the battles in other arenas where the Islamic State expanded”, Al-Naba goes on. Underlining IS’s perception that it is a single organisation operating on many fronts, Al-Naba says the fact that the infidels are replicating the methods and accusations against it “confirms the nature of the battle is the same, even if the names, languages, and races of the enemies differ. What is happening is a battle for Islam, led by the soldiers of the Islamic State”.

The Naba editorial concludes by saying that for the Christians in Africa searching for a way of living without being “surrounded by death on all sides, we bring them good news”: there is an easy way out; they can “convert to Islam or to pay the jizya” and acknowledge their subordination. If the Christians refuse either of these options, “the attacks against them will continue—the killing, the burning of their homes and shops, and the seizing of their money. This is our deen, which was revealed by God.”

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NOTES

1. The exception was Al-Naba 446, the first issue in June 2024, which featured Syria. The front pages of 42 out of the 52 editions of Al-Naba in 2023, over-80%, were from Africa.

2. The phrase translated as “racial discrimination” is “al-tamyiz al-unsuri”.