The fight for West Africa

Groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State, at war with each other in the Middle East, are working together to take control of territory across a vast stretch of West Africa, United States and local officials say, sparking fears the regional threat could grow into a global crisis.

Fighters appear to be co-ordinating attacks and carving out mutually agreed-upon areas of influence in the Sahel, a strip of land south of the Sahara Desert.

The rural territory at risk is so large it could ‘‘fit multiple Afghanistans and Iraqs’’, said Brigadier General Dagvin Anderson, head of the US military’s special operations arm in Africa.

‘‘What we have seen is not just random acts of violence under a terrorist banner but a deliberate campaign that is trying to bring these various groups under a common cause,’’ he said.

‘‘That larger effort then poses a threat to the United States.’’

The militants have used increasingly sophisticated tactics in recent months as they have rooted deeper into Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, ambushing army bases and dominating villages with surprising force, according to interviews with more than a dozen senior officials and military leaders from the US, France and West Africa.

The groups are not declaring ‘‘caliphates’’, so as to avoid scrutiny from the West, officials say – buying time to train, gather force and plot attacks that could ultimately reach major international targets.

A coalition of al Qaeda loyalists called JNIM has as many as 2000 fighters in West Africa, according to a US report released this month. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, which staged a 2017 attack that killed four American soldiers in Niger, is also thought to be hundreds strong and recruiting in northeastern Mali.

‘‘This cancer will spread far beyond here if we do not fight together to end it,’’ said General Ibrahim Fane, secretary-general of Mali’s Ministry of Defence, whose country has lost more than 100 soldiers in routine clashes since October.

The warnings come as the Pentagon weighs pulling forces from West Africa, where about 1400 troops provide intelligence and drone support among other forms of military help.

About 4400 American troops are based in East Africa, where the US military advises African forces fighting al Shabaab.

France, which has about 4500 troops in West Africa – the most of any foreign partner by far – has urged the US to stay in the battle and other European powers to step up. (The United Nations has about 13,000 peacekeepers in Mali alone.)

While al Qaeda and Isis are enemies in Syria and Yemen, allegiances in West Africa tend to be more fluid, bolstered by tribal ties and practical concerns rather than ideology. The affiliates have common foes – the West, and local governments from which they are trying to wrest control, the military leaders say.

The shared mission was not without clashes, an Arab intelligence official said. Al Qaeda leaders were recently ‘‘outraged’’ when the Isis affiliate tried to recruit from an area they viewed as their own.

US officials have long worried about the possibility of alliances between the world’s most notorious terrorist organisations, and the concerns have intensified in the months since the collapse of Isis’ self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Both groups are undergoing changes in leadership – Isis leader Abu Bakr al-baghdadi was killed in a US commando raid in Syria late last year; and al Qaeda leader Ayman al-zawahiri, 68, reportedly suffers from health problems.

West African officials say the groups in the Sahel are thought to communicate with their counterparts in the Middle East, but evidence is lacking that many fighters are flowing into the region from Syria and Iraq.

American agencies watched late last year as al Qaeda and Isis affiliates launched a seemingly co-ordinated campaign to isolate Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, by periodically seizing control of highways into the city of 2.2 million, said a counter-terrorism official in

Washington who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The extremists bombed bridges and attacked military convoys, managing to halt transit until government forces arrived to reopen the roads.

The extremists were ‘‘more organised and they are more mobile’’, said a high-ranking French military official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

‘‘They are carrying out professional attacks like we have never seen.’’

It is a departure from 2012, when al Qaeda loyalists planted flags in Mali’s northern cities and then tried to take the capital, Bamako – drawing the ire of French troops, which beat them back.

The militants appeared to have learned from that loss, the officials said, and since last July had employed a more ‘‘complex’’ approach to grabbing power, according to unclassified US Africa Command slides obtained by The Washington Post.

They are destroying infrastructure, assassinating local leaders and emptying key army posts in co-ordinated strikes to separate people from the government.

The militants saw an opportunity to drill Islamist values into one of the youngest and fastestgrowing populations on Earth, military leaders in the region said. They want to shape new fundamentalist societies: no art, no popular music, no sports, no modern education.

Militants recruited youth in the vulnerable countryside with stacks of cash, Fane said, or at gunpoint after burning villages. They provoke ethnic feuds and then offer protection. They slip through porous borders from one country to another.

Leaders are known to meet in forested hideouts – particularly near the tri-state border of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso – to plan ambushes, share intelligence and exchange battle tips, including how to make roadside bombs,

Malian army leaders say.

The militants were gaining ground, said General Oumar Dao, chief of staff for the Malian president. ‘‘We cannot afford to lose any help. This is a matter of basic survival.’’

The Malian army had about 12,000 soldiers, he said, and plans to expand this year on limited funds.

‘‘Our state is a very poor one,’’ he said. ‘‘We do not have the capacity to bring water, to bring healthcare, to bring an effective response.’’

Issa Haidera, who leads a militia of 800 people in northern Mali, said his team of mostly farmers and herders was trying to eradicate the scourge themselves. Most of his men, he said, had lost family members to the extremists. He is raising five children whose parents died at their hands. They spend most days tending to rice patches while preparing to fight. War has destroyed most of their livestock and crops.

‘‘Some people with me have nothing left,’’ he said, and others were lured to the side of ‘‘evil’’.

‘‘The terrorists,’’ Haidera said, ‘‘will hand young men more money than they have ever seen in their lives.’’

To his south in Burkina Faso, soldiers face attacks ‘‘every week’’, said Lieutenant David Ouedraogo, who heads a Burkinabe Special Operations team.

Desperation and money came up in interrogations with captured militants, he said, but ‘‘some talk because they were forced into terrorism. They had to join or the terrorists would kill their families’’.

Most of the time, though, ‘‘they know nothing about the system’’, Ouedraogo said, ‘‘or who they were even fighting for’’.

– Washington Post