Sahel Insurgency
Jihadist insurgency and state collapse across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have made the Sahel the global epicentre of terrorism deaths.
Severity score
58.4
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Armed groups affiliated with Islamic State and al-Qaeda have expanded across the central Sahel amid a series of military coups, the withdrawal of Western and UN forces, and the arrival of Russian-linked private military contractors. Burkina Faso alone accounts for a large share of global terrorism deaths. Mass displacement, school closures and blockades of towns have compounded chronic food insecurity and rapid climate stress in an already fragile region.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
58Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
78People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
25Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
50Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
90Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.