The rise of Jihadist terrorism in the Sahel worries Spain

Jihadist terrorism in the Sahel has grown considerably in activity in recent years.The director general of foreign and security policy of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, Fidel Sendagorta, has warned of the real threat that Jihadist terrorism poses to Europe.

During the closing session of the 8th Elcano Forum on Global Terrorism the diplomat made several speeches in which he expressed his incredulity at discovering that the leader of the Daesh in the Sahel was "a Sahauri from the camps".

Sendagorta wished to express his concern at the fact that Jihadist terrorism "has recruited abundantly from this quarry, as the Sahauris may have a nationalist ideology, but there has never been an Islamist or Jihadist ideological derivative". 

The Spanish high official warns that this Jihadist drift "is a phenomenon that should concern us because it is very close to our cultural/strategic world". He has thus asked Spain to pay special attention to the Sahel region.

Ten years ago, he said, terrorism in the Sahel was "an overflow of the terrorist phenomenon in Algeria", the leaders were Algerian and the phenomenon was spread by Arab tribes and some Tuaregs.

Today the weak states of the Sahel region face major challenges in dealing with the dangerous mix of Jihadist violence, communal conflicts and smuggling groups. Some Jihadist groups were largely expelled from the region by an international military intervention, launched in January 2013 at the initiative of France and which continues today. 

Even so, there are still very large areas that escape the control of the forces, French and United Nations, and are frequent targets of bloody attacks.

The explosion of the Jihadist phenomenon in the Sahel, explained Sendagorta, began with the fall of Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya. Many combatants who emigrated in the nineties to join Gaddafi's militias after the triumph of the Arab Spring returned to their homeland loaded with weapons from the Libyan colonel's arsenals. 

Most of these militants came from Sahel countries such as Chad, Burkina Faso and Mali. During his address, the diplomat warned that this phenomenon is spreading to other areas such as Togo, Benin, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria, and to eastern Mozambique, which is facing "a very serious Jihadist challenge".