Escalating / Global
US-China Strategic Competition
Trump-Xi Washington summit imminent as China ramps gray-zone pressure and the US-China balance shifts toward Beijing across key domains.
The Global Jihadist Network is what remained after the caliphate fell.
Al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks in 2001 pulled the United States into a two-decade campaign against Sunni jihadist movements, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq incubated the group that became ISIS, which declared a territorial caliphate across Iraq and Syria in 2014. A US-led coalition crushed that caliphate by 2019. The movement did not die. It scattered into franchises: Islamic State branches in the Sahel, West Africa, Afghanistan, and Central Africa, alongside Al-Qaeda affiliates across the same terrain.
The network now grows fastest in the places its enemies are least willing to fight.
The Kainji rescue and the killing of IS's global deputy are the most significant CT wins in the theater in years, yet the network's response has been redeployment, not retreat.
IS's leadership council resolved to send 100 fighters from the Lake Chad Basin toward Mali's border with Niger and 50 more to Nasarawa in central Nigeria, a cross-regional mobility that CT structures built along national lines cannot match.
Weekly net escalation pressure, last 90 days
Targeted killing is functioning as a dispersal catalyst rather than a degradation mechanism: IS central redeployed 150 fighters across three sub-theaters within weeks of losing its global deputy.
Chad's July 2026 ICC withdrawal completes a four-state bloc with Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso that has eliminated nearly every formal intelligence-sharing channel between the Lake Chad and Sahel theaters.
Nigeria's twelve-division expansion, 28,000 new recruits, and 80 percent pay rise for junior ranks improve retention and operational reach but do not address the intelligence failures rooted in community distrust.
Historically sponsored via Gulf private donors; currently largely self-financing through taxation, smuggling, and kidnapping in conflict zones
Escalating / Global
Trump-Xi Washington summit imminent as China ramps gray-zone pressure and the US-China balance shifts toward Beijing across key domains.
Escalating / Global
Saudi Arabia's Hormuz bypass pipeline is gone, collapsing export optionality back onto the chokepoint Iran now controls.
ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province) manages the Lake Chad basin theater and is navigating a succession crisis following the May 2026 killing of its.
ISSP (Islamic State Sahel Province) has formalized expansion into northwestern Nigeria with claimed ambushes in Sokoto and Kebbi.
JNIM (Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin) operates as al-Qaeda's primary Sahel franchise across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
ISKP (Islamic State Khorasan Province) functions as the network's South-Central Asia franchise and a demonstrated external-operations node.
AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) is pivoting propaganda toward Sahelian jihadist momentum and reviving English-language lone-actor incitement.