01/16/2025 Africa (International Christian Concern) – About 400 million people inhabit the Sahel, a narrow strip of the vast African continent hugging the Sahara desert’s Southern reaches and stretching from Senegal’s Atlantic coastline in the West to the Red Sea in the East. Mostly a figment of the cartographer’s imagination, the Sahel is a region plagued by extreme poverty, deep civil unrest, and rampant extremism that threatens to eradicate the very fabric of society.
The Sahel is more than just a geographic transitional zone between Africa’s Northern Sahara desert and the savannas of the South — it is also where the Muslim-majority North of Africa begins to become speckled with the occasional Christian community. South of the Sahel, vast areas of the African continent are predominantly Christian.
Christians hold the majority in Nigeria’s South, for example, exercising a great deal of political power and enjoying relative economic prosperity compared to the rest of the country. In the North, though — the region that includes a small part of the Sahel — Muslims enjoy the majority, and only a few scattered communities of Christians exist.
These communities are isolated, heavily persecuted, and largely left to fend for themselves in the face of the devastating terrorist attacks growing increasingly common in the region.
INEFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT EFFORTS
Portions of at least 11 countries — Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan — make up the Sahel, rendering it difficult to speak of laws and governance in the regional collectively. Indeed, in many parts of the region, law and governance have been practically abolished, supplanted by terrorist forces intent on establishing their vision of an Islamic caliphate.
Terrorist groups in the Sahel are increasingly taking the place of failed governments. Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) has made great territorial gains by stepping into a quasi-governmental role in areas of its control. From distributing medicine, providing education, improving roads, and distributing Qurans, ISWAP is beginning to see glimpses of the Islamic caliphate it has dedicated itself to building.
While likely welcomed by some communities desperate for some semblance of stability, the quasi-governmental role these terrorist groups fill should not be mistaken as a positive development. Human rights and the right to worship freely have suffered a devastating blow under the influence of these terrorist groups, which are openly dedicated to eradicating any vestiges of a representative or rights-based order.
Though no single political issue fuels religious repression in the Sahel, political instability and frequent coups have rendered the region’s governments incapable of effective cooperation against terrorist extremism. Across the region, military coups have become common amid rising popular frustration with how the governments have responded to terrorism, though the ensuing military governments have not managed to effectively combat terrorism either.
Governments in the Sahel vary in their willingness to confront terrorism and its underlying causes. Even where there is willingness, though, their ability to effect change varies dramatically and is, inevitably, insufficient for the need.
ROOT CAUSES
Underlying the growth of terrorism in the Sahel is extreme poverty, which has plagued the region for centuries. Nearly 65% of the Sahel’s population is younger than 25 years old, making it one of the youngest regions in the world and indicating the extreme challenges to survival in the region. In this difficult context, radicalization and religious extremism are growing, fueled by mass discontent with the status quo and the need to protect resources from competing groups.
This extremism often affects Christian pastors and their congregations. Even clashes over resources like land and water can metastasize into religious conflicts, with vulnerable Christian communities — a small minority in the region — attacked and sometimes massacred. Religious animosity is now a driving factor in many conflicts and must be addressed for peace and cooperation to return.
In northern Nigeria and the surrounding countries, the Boko Haram terrorist group maintains a priority scale of targets, with Christians at the top, followed by the government and Muslims who have not joined the group. Since its founding in northern Nigeria in 2002, Boko Haram has grown into a regional terrorist group and now operates in Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad. The group is dedicated to creating an area of complete Islamic domination. It uses a degree of violence to accomplish its goals that have long rendered it repugnant, even to other terrorist organizations.
Known for its mass abductions of schoolchildren, some of whom it has assimilated into its ranks as wives or child soldiers, Boko Haram has managed to survive and even grow despite an international coalition dedicated to its eradication.
In Sudan, both sides of the conflict continue to target churches, pastors, and Christian worshippers through bombings and ground operations that have led to the destruction or repurposing of at least 165 churches since the civil war broke out in 2023. Only about 5% of Sudan’s population is Christian, while about 91% identify as Sunni Muslim. The state of religious freedom in Sudan has been bleak for decades, with Christians just recently coming out of the 30-year reign of dictator Omar al-Bashir and the Sharia-based legal system he imposed.
Due to the mass unrest in the Sahel, millions of civilians have been uprooted from their homes and displaced, either internally or across borders in refugee camps. More than 8 million Sudanese have been displaced since the civil war started in 2023, and the U.N. estimates that about 3.3 million were displaced in the early part of 2024 across Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger.
While this displacement has affected followers of every religion, terrorist groups often target Christians, who are particularly vulnerable to being uprooted.
THE FUTURE
Ethnic and economic divides in the Sahel are easy to see. The region is home to hundreds of distinct ethnic groups, and there are large regional disparities in access to resources. Unfortunately, religious tensions — a harder issue to define — are often ignored by policymakers at the cost of the ability to forge an effective solution to the nuanced issues at stake.
As the Sahel’s scattered Christian communities look to the future, the potential for real change seems dim. Today, the area’s governments are so ineffective that fighters from Boko Haram and ISWAP both report that internecine fighting between the groups has inflicted more damage in the last several years than all the government and coalition efforts combined. Such is the success of these two terrorist groups that their biggest concern lies in whether it is their caliphate or another that rules the land, not the international coalition aligned against them.
If the international coalition dedicated to fighting terrorism in the Sahel is serious about its commitment, one factor that must be addressed is religious freedom. Though not the only factor driving the conflict, it is a major one that the world cannot afford to ignore. By refusing to recognize the way Christian communities are targeted for their faith, the region’s governments make it impossible to stop the persecution plaguing its people.
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