[AlAhram] Militant Islamist violence in Africa set new records for violent mostly peaceful events and fatalities this past year. This continues a relentless decade-long upward trend. To give a sense of the accelerating pace of this threat, both violent mostly peaceful events and fatalities have almost doubled since 2019.
| The threat is concentrated in five theatres: the Sahel, Somalia, the Lake Chad Basin, northern Mozambique and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Sahel and Somalia accounted for 77% of all such violent events in the past year. |
In a recent Africa Center for Strategic Studies analysis, we found that there were 6,859 episodes of violence involving krazed killer Islamist groups in Africa in 2022. This is a 22% increase from 2021. Fatalities linked to these events shot up 48% to 19,109 deaths. This reflects a sharp rise in deaths per event.
Notably, the spike in violence was marked by a 68% increase in fatalities involving civilians. This figure is significant: these krazed killer groups are not focused on winning hearts and minds so much as intimidating local populations into compliance. |