The Radisson Blu hotel, in Bamako, Mali, is the city’s finest: peach-colored brick, with a swirling pool and sleek, minimalist rooms. As in other West African capitals, like Dakar and Lagos, the Radisson Blu is a popular spot for the local business and political élite, and also for travellers and expatriates—an immense amount of wealth and privilege concentrated in a seven-story hotel. So when militants invaded the hotel, earlier today, taking some hundred and seventy hostages, the meaning of their strike was clear. Al Mourabitoun, an Islamist group that has branded itself as Al Qaeda in West Africa and is based in the desert of northern Mali, claimed responsibility for the siege. As of now, the death toll is twenty-seven, including two terrorists. After most of the hostages escaped, the battle between Malian troops, assisted by French special forces, and the gunmen, who were holed up in the hotel’s top floors, went on for several hours.
Mali’s struggles with Islamists reached a peak in 2012, when Islamist fighters occupied the north of the country after a government coup. They were later driven out by a French-led military invasion, but elements lingered. In 2013, Al Mouribatoun emerged, and has since taken the blame for several attacks, including one on a hotel in Sevare, a town northeast of Bamako, where seventeen people, U.N. employees among them, were killed. One of the group’s leaders, a man named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was behind an assault in 2013 on an Algerian gas plant, where thirty-seven hostages died. Though the Islamic State is believed to have worked alone in attacking Paris last week, Al Mouribatoun and others are likely inspired and influenced by the group. It’s reported that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has long extended its funds, training, and arms to African extremist groups from Nigeria to Somalia. (In an audio recording, Al Mouribatoun said that a separate regional Al Qaeda affiliate also participated in the Radisson Blu raid.) Does sub-Saharan Africa now have to worry about the Islamic State strengthening these same homegrown terrorist groups, too?
There are signs this may already be happening. The Global Terrorism Index, a study that ranks nations in terms of terrorist activity, was released this week, and showed that, last year, Boko Haram, the Islamist group originating in northeast Nigeria, caused more deaths than the Islamic State (6,644 deaths compared to 6,073). On Wednesday, a suicide bomber killed thirty-four people in the northeastern city of Yola. The next day, two young female suicide bombers killed at least fifteen people in a market in the northern metropolis of Kano. Authorities attributed all of these attacks to Boko Haram. Some Nigeria observers, myself included, have been reluctant to emphasize Boko Haram’s international ties over its specific domestic grievances. But in March, the group explicitly declared partnership with the Islamic State. This followed a winter in which its campaign became more grotesque and severe than ever, when the group attempted to govern towns under a thug-like Sharia rule, meting out harsh punishments. This year, the Nigerian Army was able to recover much of the territory it lost to Boko Haram. Even so, the group continues to pose a potent threat, in part because of its reënergizing by Iraq- and Syria-based counterparts.
When attacks by Islamic State affiliates occur in African cities, towns, and villages, they are regarded by outsiders as far more mundane than similar events in Paris. It doesn’t spark surprise to hear of another Boko Haram suicide bombing or a skirmish in Mali, even as today’s hotel raid, exceptional for the way in which it targeted foreigners, garnered international attention. There should be a fear that, as these various terror campaigns intensify, no one outside of these countries will take much notice—until it’s impossible to reverse their growth and limit their reach.
There are many details of the Bamako siege that still need to be parsed. Witnesses say they heard gunmen speaking in English. A few said they were freed after proving they could recite verses from the Koran. Others remember seeing up to ten terrorists, still others only two. And we don’t yet know much about the gunmen on the top of the Radisson Blu, fighting Malian soldiers until their last breaths.
