The Islamic State in Africa:

Publisher: Hurst, London, 2021, 288pp. ISBN: 9781787383906.

In late March 2019, after a nearly two-month-long battle, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a militia alliance dominated by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and supported by the United States-led Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve coalition – captured the last major stronghold of the Islamic State (IS) militant organization in Syria. IS had previously been driven out of its urban strongholds of the Iraqi city of Mosul in July 2017 and the Syrian city of Raqqa in October of the same year. In October 2019, the IS “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, committed suicide after being cornered by U.S. special operations forces. It was under al-Baghdadi that IS first sought to build up alliances and affiliate branch networks across Africa, from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula to Libya, across the Sahel into northern Nigeria, and southeast into Somalia, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In 2014, he publicly declared IS to be the only legitimate “Islamic” polity and demanded that all Muslim organizations, including Al- Qaeda and its regional allies and affiliates, join IS, a call which was categorically rejected by the majority of Sunni jihadi groups. Under al-Baghdadi’s command, IS dedicated a significant amount of financial, human, and media resources to build networks in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, laying the groundwork for the expansion of IS’s African affiliates since 2019.