August 5, 2025, 10:00 am
Author – Nick Turse
The Intercept has been chronicling the U.S. military’s futile counterterrorism efforts on the African continent for the last decade. We have reported on increases in the number and reach of terror groups, rising militant attacks, spikes in fatalities, destabilizing blowback from U.S. operations, humanitarian disasters, failed secret wars, coups by U.S. trainees, human rights abuses by allies, massacres and executions by partner forces, civilians killed in drone strikes, and a litany of other fiascos and failures.
A new Pentagon report offers the grimmest assessment yet of the results of the last 10 years of U.S. military efforts on the continent. It corroborates years of reporting on catastrophes that U.S. Africa Command has long attempted to ignore or cover up.
Fatalities from militant Islamist violence spiked over the years of America’s most vigorous counterterrorism efforts on the continent, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement — Somalia and the West African Sahel — suffering the worst outcomes.
“Africa has experienced roughly 155,000 militant Islamist group-linked deaths over the past decade,” reads a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. “Somalia and the Sahel have now experienced more militant Islamist-related fatalities over the past decade (each over 49,000) than any other region.”
“What many people don’t know is that the United States’ post-9/11 counterterrorism operations actually contributed to and intensified the present-day crisis and surge of violent deaths in the Sahel and Somalia,” Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, told The Intercept, referencing the frequent targeting of minority ethnic groups by U.S. partners during counterterrorism operations.
The U.S. provided tens of millions of dollars in weapons and training to the governments of countries like Burkina Faso and Niger, which are experiencing the worst spikes in violent deaths today, she said. “In those critical early years, those governments used the infusion of U.S. military funding, weapons, and training to target marginalized groups within their own borders, intensifying the cycle of violence we now see wreaking such a devastating human toll.”
U.S. Africa Command acknowledged The Intercept’s questions about the report and its findings but did not answer them.
Terrorist groups are also gaining ground at an exponential rate. “The past year has also seen militant Islamists [sic] groups in the Sahel and Somalia expand their hold on territory,” according to the Africa Center. “Across Africa, an estimated 950,000 square kilometers (367,000 square miles) of populated territories are outside government control due to militant Islamist insurgencies. This is equivalent to the size of Tanzania.” And as militant groups have expanded their reach, Africans have paid a grave price: a 60 percent increase in fatalities since 2023, compared with deaths from 2020 to 2022, according to the report.
Even these grim statistics don’t capture the true size and scope of U.S. counterterrorism failures. In 2002 and 2003, the U.S. was just beginning its decadeslong effort to provide billions of dollars in security assistance, train many thousands of African military personnel, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on a wide range of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in ground combat with militants in Africa. In those years, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks, resulting in a combined 23 casualties across the entire continent. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa. This represents an almost 97,000 percent increase. Somalia and the Sahel saw the most acute violence.
U.S. Special Operations forces were first dispatched to Somalia in 2002, followed by military aid, advisers, private contractors, bases, helicopters, and drones. The Pentagon was well aware of fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa as early as 2007, according to a study conducted for the military that was obtained exclusively by The Intercept. Almost two decades later, U.S. troops are still conducting counterterrorism operations there against the Islamist militant groups al-Shabaab and the Islamic State.
Earlier this year, the U.S. carried out an attack in Somalia that one top U.S. commander called the “largest airstrike in the history of the world.” The Trump administration has already conducted 54 attacks in Somalia in 2025, exceeding the total number of strikes by the Biden administration last year. This mirrors the spike in attacks during President Donald Trump’s first term. Despite, or perhaps because of these relentless attacks, al-Shabaab’s “capabilities have expanded in the past year,” according to the Africa Center, and its annual revenues — up to $200 million — are “on par with Somalia’s federal member states.”
“Somalia faces Africa’s most enduring militant Islamist group with al-Shabaab sustaining extremist violence since it was established in 2006,” according to the Africa Center analysis. “Somalia has seen a spike in violence linked to al Shabaab since 2023. … The 6,224 fatalities linked to al Shabaab over the past year are double that of 2022.”
The findings are even more damning for West Africa, where an increasing number of nations are plagued by terrorist groups that have grown, splintered, reconstituted, and spread across the region. Under the black banners of Islamist militancy, men on motorcycles and armed with AK-47s thunder into villages to impose their harsh brand of Sharia law and terrorize, assault, and kill civilians. Attacks by these militants and government atrocities against civilians in response have destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger and, increasingly, threaten bordering countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Senegal, Mauritania, and Togo.
“The Sahel has experienced a sustained high level of lethality tied to militant Islamist groups in recent years,” reads the new Africa Center report. “The nearly 10,500 average annual deaths over the past 3 years are more than double the 4,900 annual fatalities experienced between 2020 and 2023. This represents a sevenfold increase in annual fatalities since 2019.”
As violence spiraled in the region over the past decades, at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance were key leaders in a dozen coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel including Burkina Faso (in 2014, 2015, and twice in 2022) and Mali (in 2012, 2020, and 2021).
The U.S. has poured billions of dollars in military assistance into Burkina Faso, Mali, and its neighbors over roughly two decades, enabling human rights abuses by providing weapons and training to militaries that have terrorized civilians, according to the United Nations, human rights advocacy groups, and the U.S. State Department. The Africa Center found that Malian and allied security forces were responsible for 82 percent of all civilian fatalities over the past year. In Burkina Faso, the figure was 41 percent.
In 2023, The Intercept reported from neighboring Niger on the failure of 20 years of counterterrorism efforts, the spread of Islamist militancy, and abuses of minority ethnic groups by U.S. partner forces. AFRICOM pretended the problems did not exist and said the U.S. was “further[ing] our mutual security goals.” But Niger has been “experiencing a rapid deterioration in its security since the military coup against the democratic government of President Mahmoud Bazoum in 2023,” according to the Africa Center. Left unsaid was that at least five leaders of that coup d’état received American assistance. Since then, fatalities linked to militant Islamist violence have quadrupled, including a 49 percent increase in civilian deaths in Niger over the past year.
The Africa Center’s new analysis echoed a grim assessment of security on the African continent offered by AFRICOM chief Gen. Michael Langley during a June press conference with various media outlets, including The Intercept. The West African Sahel, he said, was now the “epicenter of terrorism,” and the gravest terrorist threats to the U.S. homeland were “unfortunately right here on the African continent.”
Katherine Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and one of the foremost experts on secret military efforts in Africa, noted that the U.S. continued to double down on expenditures of blood and treasure without measuring the effectiveness of its counterterrorism initiatives. “Clearly, there’s been too little congressional and public oversight of these military efforts to determine whether they are strategic and effective,” she told The Intercept, noting that the Department of Defense long delayed compliance with a law that requires it to monitor and evaluate its work with partner forces.
Ebright pointed out that during the Biden administration the Pentagon finally published a first-of-its-kind analysis of its long-running counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel. The findings spotlighted shortcomings that have contributed to mass displacement, humanitarian crises, coups, atrocities, and the deaths of around 155,000 Africans.
Trump’s effort to scuttle the U.S. Agency for International Development and slash funding to the United Nations and other foreign aid this year have further exacerbated humanitarian crises that have deepened over the last two decades. One recent Lancet study warned that USAID funding cuts “could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years.”
The United Nations recently warned that almost 30 million people across the Sahel “require life-saving aid and humanitarian protection in 2025.” But only 8 percent of the required $4.3 billion in humanitarian funding had been received by May, forcing aid agencies to reduce assistance to 8.8 million of the most vulnerable people.
The Pentagon report on efforts in the Sahel found, notably, that traditional, nonmilitary diplomacy and aid are necessary tools for addressing the economic and governance problems that allow militant groups to proliferate. It also determined that U.S. military involvement was “insufficient for fundamentally changing the security environment” and that traditional U.S. “security cooperation programs are unlikely to lead to notable changes in the security environment.”
The post Pentagon: U.S. Counterterrorism Efforts Have Failed Africans appeared first on The Intercept.
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Author: Nick Turse
