As the world focuses on the various events of the Western hemisphere, an old enemy reappears from the ashes in the Middle East.
The Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS or Daesh, is a fundamentalist jihadist group that seeks to impose a radical caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
IS is a coalition of various countries and non-state actors. The U.S., Russia, the Kurds, both belligerent sides of the Syrian civil war and the Iraqi resistance have faced the uprising of this group since 2013. IS finally disbanded as a subsidiary of Al-Qaeda and undertook alone the enterprise of recreating the Al-Andaluz caliphate while uniting the Muslim world into a single entity.
During the first few months, the Islamic State managed to acquire large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq, while unleashing a wave of terrorist attacks in Europe and Asia through foreign cells recruited by social media.
The Daesh was tactically defeated in 2019, having lost key cities like Mosul, Palmyra and eventually Baguz, and was forced to remain on the dunes of the Syrian desert pending resolution of the Syrian civil conflict. Unfortunately, IS’s decentralized nature allowed it to flourish in another arid zone: sub-Saharan Africa.
This part of the world was traditionally part of the French sphere of influence, but for a few decades, the deployment of mercenaries like Wagner and the strong pan-African anti-French sentiment felt by many Africans over French colonization in the 19th and 20th centuries left Russia as the power with a foothold in Africa.
The war in Ukraine left the African theater as a secondary target for the Kremlin, and along with the dismantling of Wagner following Prigozhin’s betrayal of Putin, it left power vacuums.
These gaps were exploited by the jihadists to seize power. IS has great influence in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, the latter of which is a government on the verge of falling to IS in the Sahel.
However, the subsidiaries of the Islamic States do not stop there; they also have a presence in Libya, Somalia, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, the Congo, Uganda and cells in countries as far away as Russia, the Philippines and Chechnya.
The deadliest terrorist group on Earth may have been defeated in the Middle East, but they are gaining strength in various parts of the world, and seem even more determined in their quest to subjugate the world to an extremist Islamic caliphate.
To get used to the idea, Al-Qaeda broke ties with IS because for Al-Qaeda, IS was too radical. They have been able to recruit people from all over the world through little-monitored social media like Telegram. As a result, no country is safe from IS attacks. They have been suspected of being stationed in Venezuela, and have managed to commit terrorist acts as far away as Australia, only in 2025.
The situation is near out of control, especially because of the precarious state of African state militias, which cannot cope with their meager budget against the machinery of Daesh.
Kidnappings, slavery, smuggling, illegal mining, oil extraction, from the inside out behave like a feudal state of the seventh century, but from the outside they are like any modern capitalist state. They stopped destroying several archaeological centers in order to sell the relics to the highest bidder on the black market.
Since their defeat, they have adopted a more decentralized form of organization, in which each province and region of the Islamic State is practically autonomous, with each branch operating without the need for a central command. In short, Daesh has become a hydra; you cut off one head and two more will grow in its place.
Their religious fanaticism makes it utterly impossible to negotiate with them, and the territories under their control are subject to strict religious laws. However, those countries that have the power to intervene militarily seem to forget the war against Daesh in the Levant.
If the IS continues to develop into this kind of multicontinental federal state, it may be too powerful the next time they declare a caliphate, as if the U.S. and Russia only have to send bombers and missiles.
