Global Terrorism Index 2025

​Results
 
The Sahel: Summary
The Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa continues to suffer from the effects of increased political instability, amplified geopolitical tensions, and the use of hard counterterrorism measures to deter and destroy the threat from Salafi-jihadi groups. While sub-Saharan Africa recorded a five per cent decline in terrorism deaths in 2024 to 909 from the prior year, the Sahel has seen the steepest increases in terrorism deaths globally, with nearly 20,000 deaths since 2019 and 3,885 deaths in 2024. 
 
The Sahel region faces many converging and complex social, economic, political and security challenges. These are likely to continue to undermine the development of the conditions necessary for stability, trapping the Sahel in a cycle of violence and vulnerability. 
 
The region has seen large changes in its conflict dynamics with an array of armed state and non-state actors waging war, controlling large swathes of territory and using resource extraction and illicit economies to advance their strategic goals. The groups include national armies, state aligned paramilitaries and self-defence groups, separatist rebels, Salafist jihadist groups. Added to this, there have been multiple foreign interventions - from France, the United Nations, the US and more recently Russia, through state aligned private military companies, initially the Wagner Group and from 2024 onwards known as Africa Corps. 
 
The conflict is driven by deep divisions within societies and conflicts between ethnic groups, between the central government and peripheral regions, and global geopolitics. While ideologies play a part, economics and power are more important drivers of conflict, and in both cases the continuation of conflict can be lucrative for the interested parties, and as such propels the conflict along with little hope of a sustainable resolution in the near future. 
 
The inability of several Sahelian governments to provide effective security has resulted in terrorist groups controlling significant amounts of rural territory and making the Sahel increasingly violent. Salafi-jihadis and bandits have looked to exploit socio-economic, political vacuums as well as grievances. 
 
Terrorist groups IS and JNIM continuing to gain momentum with their violent campaigns in the region, with the Sahel accounting 51 per cent of terrorism deaths globally in 2024, compared with just one per cent in 2007. 
 
Global Terrorism Index 2025. Institute for Economics & Peace. Sydney, Australia.