Schedule Note: As it has been a little while since I have written about the Islamic State’s weekly newsletter, Al-Naba, today and the next couple of days will be a catch-up on that front, looking at where the jihadists have been directing their military and ideological energies. After that, before the end of the month, I plan to take a look at what we have learned from the freed Israeli hostages about their suffering in HAMAS captivity, plus an article on the Nazi fugitives in Latin America, and the final part of the series on the Salem Witch Trials (sorry for the long delay on that one).
Over the last four months, the Islamic State’s (IS) weekly newsletter, Al-Naba, has continued to foreground Africa in its reports of its military activities around the world. This is a long-running trend.
In 2023 and 2024, over 80% of Al-Naba front pages were from Africa, and of 42 editions of Al-Naba put out so far in 2025 by IS, 42 of them (95%) have had reports from African theatres on the front page. The two exceptions, one in February and one in August, had Afghanistan and Syria, respectively, as the cover stories.
This article will provide summaries of the most recent twenty editions of Al-Naba, numbers 498 to 517, which is all of them from June through mid-October 2025. As will be seen, a couple of developments and themes stand out:
The “Islamic State West Africa Province” (ISWAP), which contains the remnants of what had been “Boko Haram”, initiated a campaign called “Burning of the Camps” (Mahraqa al-Mu’askarat)—possible to render as “Holocaust of the Camps”—in February 2025. The focus was on storming and burning military camps or bases in Nigeria. From June to early August, Al-Naba regularly highlighted the campaign and expanded the campaign label to actions in other theatres, notably the Sahel and Mozambique.
IS’s war on Christians in Africa is a theme that appears in almost every issue examined here, with a particular concentration on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, since Christians in the east of that country have proven particularly vulnerable to the “Islamic State Central Africa Province” (ISCAP). The massacres of Congolese Christian civilians have been instrumentalised in Al-Naba propaganda to bolster IS’s claims to legitimacy, portraying the jihadists as upholding the traditional “freedom” offered in Islam to Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book): conversion, paying the jizya (“poll tax” infidels pay for protection under Muslim rule), or death.
The reported IS clashes with Al-Qaeda in the African Sahel, once a major dynamic between the two groups, seems now to be limited to intermittent engagements in Burkina Faso.
IS’s territorial control, allowing greater operational freedom for officials to meet and plan, among other things, is reportedly expanding and entrenching in Mozambique.
IS’s da’wa (missionary or proselytism activities) are claimed to be making substantive inroads among Congolese Christians, and the open staging of da’wa events in Mozambique is offered as evidence that IS is solidifying control over various areas.
IS’s attacks in Syria against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which uses the “Syrian Democratic Forces” cover name on Syrian territory, remain low-level in nature, but across these few months the geographical range has expanded from Deir Ezzor to Hasaka and Raqqa.
Despite a series of American and local decapitation strikes against IS in Somalia, the IS node in that State appears to be recovering. Puntland, the autonomous zone in northeast Somalia, was, for six consecutive weeks, from late August to early October 2025, the cover story in Al-Naba (editions 510 to 515).
As interesting as what Naba has focused on is what is not in these issues. The Syrian operations include no attacks against the new Islamist government. Signs of activity in Iraq are very infrequent and, one might say, a little performative when they do occur. In the ideological realm, IS’s coverage of Israel and the Gaza war has been relatively meagre. Such essays, when they appear, are invariably primarily targeted at other Muslims and their deviant beliefs, as IS sees them, above all the populist Muslim focus on “Palestine” as a “nationalist” entity, rather than merely one front in a global jihad against non-believers.
AL-NABA 498 (5 JUNE 2025)
Front Page: Africa (Nigeria)
Main Editorial: “Between Jihad and Hajj”, an ideological essay arguing jihad is the more important obligation for Muslims inter alia “because [jihad] defends the very foundation of the deen [lifeway, Islam] and protects the lands of Islam wherein Hajj and other acts of worship can continue.”
Military Activities Reports:
West Africa Province [first report is always from the front page]: Attacks on two military vehicles and two barracks belonging to the Nigerian army, as well as an ambush of the army in a town (Lassa), all in Borno State in the far north-east.
Central Africa Province: An IS ambush against the Ugandan army in the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Syria: An IED attack on government troops “in the area around Tulul al-Safa in the Badiya of al-Suwayda” (the southeastern deserts).
Syria: Two separate attacks in “Al-Khayr” (Deir Ezzor) against vehicles carrying troops of “the PKK”.
Notes:
The ISCAP article on the ambush of the Ugandan military was mostly focused on the apparent success of IS’s da’wa efforts in converting fifty Congolese Christians in Ituri to (their version of) Islam.
The article about the attack in the Syrian badiya has within it effectively a mini-essay portraying the regime of Ahmad al-Shara as a continuation of Bashar al-Asad’s system: the same “subservience to the international community”, making agreements with “the Zionists”, and “crimes” against Muslims. “[T]he faces differ, but the policy is one, as both are loyal to the enemies of God, and both serve their interests at the expense of Islam and the Muslims.” The muwahideen (strict monotheist) duty to continue “striking them with explosive devices and other means” all over the country to exhaust them, therefore, remains.
AL-NABA 499 (12 JUNE 2025)
Front Page: Africa (Nigeria and Cameroon)
Main Editorial: “Security Education” (al-Tarbiya al-Amniyya). Argues that security education ranks alongside “military and shari’a education” as “part of the prophetic methodology, a legal obligation [farida shar’iyya] when jihad is ongoing, and a strategic necessity at all times”. IS says the security apparatus is the “shield and sword” (dir’ wa-sayf) of the jihad movement, a phrase interestingly reminiscent of the KGB’s self-description of its role in the Soviet Revolution, describing success in this field as requiring a mindset—“one that combines patience, caution, wisdom, and decisiveness”—and being “a continuous process” throughout a jihadists’ life, “not a one-time course”, in order to adapt to technological circumstances.
Military Activities Reports:
West Africa Province: Attacks in Nigeria, on an army vehicle and two military bases; casualties modest; specified as part of the “Burning of the Camps” campaign. Nigerian Christian civilians were also attacked. Just over the border from Nigeria’s Borno State, in the far north of Cameroon, a military camp in Maroua was burned down.
Somalia: IS in “Wilayat al-Somal [Somalia Province] continue to inflict heavy losses on the apostate Puntland forces and the militias of the international alliance”, claimed to amount to killing and wounding 70 in a series of ambushes and IEDs against vehicles, though one unfortunate was allegedly captured and “executed”.
Sahel Province: Stormed, massacred, and looted a military base in Mali.
Mozambique: Assassinated two members of “the Christian militias” and attacked one of their bases in the Cabo Delgado area.
Khorasan: “The soldiers of the Caliphate in Wilayat Khorasan detonated an explosive device on a vehicle belonging to the apostate Taliban militia … in Nangarhar”, Afghanistan.
Central Africa Province: Killing dozens of soldiers in clashes in eastern Congo.
Notes:
IS claims in the Mozambique article that its control in parts of the north is so extensive it “performed the Eid al-Adha prayer in several locations … [where the jihadists] gathered in the open and celebrated the occasion in an atmosphere of security and tranquillity”.
The ISCAP report claimed, ostensibly from “a source exclusive to Al-Naba”, that IS’s ongoing “da’wa campaign in the Ituri and Beni regions … preached to the Christians … the falsehood of their beliefs, and … more than 100 of them embraced Islam”, adding that the jihadists in the Congo also “performed the Eid al-Adha prayer in the open”.
AL-NABA 500 (19 JUNE 2025)
Front Page: Africa (Puntland, Somalia)
Main Editorial: “The State of Persia and the State of the Jews”. IS says Muslims should be pleased these two disbelieving forces are clashing—it is by God’s design, after all—but condemns those Muslims who have sided with the “Rafidite” (derog. Shi’i) Iranians just because they are attacking the Jews. Al-Naba adds: Iran is not acting for the sake of the Palestinians, but to aggrandise its own power. The Muslim duty in these circumstances is to remember their commitment to Islam (i.e., IS and its ideology) and exploit any weaknesses or instability caused by the Persian-Jewish war for the sake of the jihadist cause.
Military Activities Reports:
Somalia: Lured Puntland forces into a major ambush and killed dozens of them despite IS’s opponents having air support in a six-hour battle. This is a “continuation of the heavy losses suffered by the apostate forces despite the continuous support from the Crusaders”, according to Al-Naba.
West Africa Province: Two IED attacks on army patrols, one in Nigeria, one in Niger.
Mozambique: Three attacks in Cabo Delgado: assassinated a soldier, shelled a camp, and murdered two Christian civilians.
Central Africa Province: Slaughtered five Christian civilians in eastern Congo.
Syria: Killed a PKK operative and two separate attacks on tankers in Deir Ezzor.
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