North Africa was Islamized in the centuries after the 640s. The slow conquest → South of the Sahara the same frontier is moving now, by the two old methods at once: law imposed from above, and armed groups clearing the land below. The jihadists kill Muslims who refuse them, Sufi shrines they call idolatry, and Christians whose churches stand in the way. Each target tells you the same thing about the goal.
The Pact of Umar needed an empire. A state legislature will do.
8 September 1983 · Sudan's September Laws
President Gaafar Nimeiry imposed sharia across all of Sudan, including the Christian and animist south, tearing up the autonomy the south had won in 1972. The south took up arms. The Second Sudanese Civil War ran from 1983 to 2005 and killed roughly two million people.
9 July 2011 · The south walks out
In January 2011 southern Sudan voted in a referendum. About 99% chose independence, and South Sudan became a country. Nubia, which held out against the Arab armies for six centuries and fell to migration and marriage, was the north. The south chose partition over sharia.
1999–2002 · Northern Nigeria
Zamfara state introduced sharia criminal law in October 1999. By 2002 twelve northern states had followed: Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara. The codes brought in the hudud: stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, flogging for drinking, in a country whose constitution forbids a state religion.
12 May 2022 · Sokoto
Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a Christian second-year student, was accused of blasphemy over a message in a class chat group. Fellow students beat her, stoned her to death on campus, and set her body on fire under tyres. The law on the books was sharia. The sentence was carried out by the crowd.
The groups here fly the flags of al-Qaeda and Islamic State and say what they want: the state gone, the caliphate in its place.
14 April 2014 · Chibok
Boko Haram, whose name means roughly "Western education is forbidden," kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from their school in Borno state. A decade later Amnesty International counted 82 still in captivity.
June–July 2012 · Timbuktu
Al-Qaeda-linked Ansar Dine fighters took pickaxes to the ancient Sufi mausoleums of Timbuktu as idolatry. In 2016 the International Criminal Court convicted Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi of the war crime of destroying ten of its historic and religious monuments and sentenced him to nine years: the first international prosecution ever for destroying cultural heritage. The target was Islam's own past.
October 2017 onward · Cabo Delgado, Mozambique
A local insurgency in Mozambique's far north was formally accepted by Islamic State as an affiliate in 2019. It has killed more than 6,500 people and driven roughly a million from their homes, beheading villagers and burning churches along the way.
5 June 2022 · Owo
Gunmen attacked St Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Owo, in Nigeria's south-west, during Pentecost Mass, killing more than 40 worshippers and wounding about 141. In 2026 a federal court sentenced four men to death for terrorism as members of the group behind it.
24 December 2023 · Plateau
On Christmas Eve gunmen overran more than 17 villages in Bokkos and Barkin-Ladi in Nigeria's Middle Belt, burning houses and killing at least 161 people by the Nigerian Red Cross count, with local officials putting it at 195, and leaving 29,350 displaced. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom's 2026 report names Fulani militants as the deadliest threat in Nigeria, attacking often but not exclusively
Christian farming communities, burning homes and churches as well as kidnapping, raping, and murdering.
2025 · The Sahel
In Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, al-Qaeda's JNIM and Islamic State Sahel Province killed more than 10,000 people in a year and now control or contest much of all three countries. The Sahel has been the deadliest theatre of militant Islamist violence in Africa for years running, 55% of all such deaths on the continent. In Somalia, al-Shabaab was linked to 6,224 deaths in a year, double 2022.