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The Sahel region retained its unenviable distinction as the global fulcrum of terrorist activity in 2024, commanding responsibility for over half of the world’s terrorism-related fatalities for the second consecutive year, according to findings unveiled on Wednesday, March 5, 2025, by the Institute for Economics and Peace in its annual Global Terrorism Index.
From a worldwide count of 7,555 lives lost to terrorist acts last year, the Sahel—a vast semi-arid expanse skirting the Sahara’s southern boundary—accounted for 3,885, translating to a 51 percent portion of the grim toll, as delineated in the think tank’s meticulous assessment.
Employing a multifaceted metric that encompasses the frequency of assaults, fatalities, injuries, and abductions, the index evaluates 163 nations annually, offering a comprehensive gauge of their entanglement with terrorist violence—a methodology that underscores the Sahel’s outsized burden.
Among the 10 countries most severely afflicted in 2024, five lie within this volatile corridor traversing Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, with Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger perennially entrenched among the hardest-hit since 2017—a trio ensnared in relentless strife.
The roots of this turmoil trace back to 2012, when jihadist insurgency ignited in northern Mali, subsequently spilling across borders to engulf Niger and Burkina Faso by 2015, perpetuating a cycle of violence that continues to destabilize the region’s socio-political fabric.
The findings indicate that the epicentre of terrorism has seen a pronounced “geographic shift” away from the Middle East and towards the Sahel since 2023, the study said.
Burkina Faso remained the worst hit country in the world for the second consecutive year, even though the number of deaths fell to 1,532 from 1,935 the previous year.
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In Mali, the toll of lives extinguished by terrorist violence reached 604 in 2024, a somber statistic etched into the annals of the Sahel’s enduring crisis, as documented in the Global Terrorism Index unveiled on Wednesday, March 5, 2025.
Niger bore witness to an unparalleled escalation in fatalities, with the index identifying a 94 percent surge to 930 deaths—an ascent that positioned this uranium-rich nation as the globe’s most dramatically afflicted by terrorism’s lethal toll in proportional terms, a harrowing distinction for one of the world’s key resource producers.
Predominantly, the carnage across the Sahel stemmed from the machinations of two jihadist factions: the Islamic State and its regional offshoots, alongside the Al Qaeda-affiliated Group to Support Islam and Muslims (JNIM), entities whose relentless campaigns have cast long shadows over the region’s stability.
Alternative assessments, such as those compiled by the international conflict observatory ACLED, posit an even graver count of casualties from jihadist incursions in the Sahel, suggesting a death toll that surpasses the index’s figures and amplifies the scale of the humanitarian tragedy.
Governance in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso resides in the hands of military regimes, each established through coups d’état between 2020 and 2023, a trio that has since severed ties with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to forge an autonomous Sahel alliance.
This geopolitical realignment has seen these nations distance themselves from France—their erstwhile colonial overseer—while cultivating nascent strategic bonds with Russia and China, a shift that has recalibrated their security architecture.
The report contends that this pivot in alliances, coupled with the withdrawal from ECOWAS, has emboldened factions like JNIM to extend their operational reach into the coastal states of West Africa, a development that signals an ominous expansion of instability beyond the Sahel’s traditional confines.
