DAKAR — Having slipped undetected into Mali's capital weeks ago, the jihadis struck just before dawn prayers. They killed dozens of students at an elite police training academy, stormed Bamako's airport and set the presidential jet on fire.

The Sept 17 attack was the most brazen since 2016 in a capital city in the Sahel, a vast arid region stretching across sub-Saharan Africa south of the Sahara Desert.

It showed that jihadist groups with links to al Qaeda or Islamic State, whose largely rural insurgency has killed thousands of civilians and displaced millions in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, can also launch a major attack.

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Overshadowed by conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan, the fighting in the Sahel rarely garners global headlines, yet it is contributing to a sharp rise in migration from the region towards Europe at a time when anti-immigrant far-right parties are on the rise and some EU states are tightening their borders.

According to the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM), the route to Europe with the steepest rise in numbers this year is via West African coastal nations to Spain's Canary Islands.

IOM data shows the number of migrants arriving in Europe from Sahel countries (Burkina, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal) rose 62 percent to 17,300 in the first six months of 2024 from 10,700 a year earlier, a rise the UN and the IOM have blamed on conflict and climate change.

Fifteen diplomats and experts told Reuters the swathes of territory under jihadist control also risk becoming training grounds and launchpads for more attacks on major cities such as Bamako, or neighboring states and Western targets, in the region or beyond.

Jihadi violence, especially the heavy toll it has taken on government troops, was a major factor in a wave of military coups since 2020 against Western-backed governments in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the countries at the heart of the Sahel.

Global terrorism hotspot

Western powers that previously invested in trying to beat back the jihadists have very little capacity left on the ground, especially since the junta in Niger last year ordered the US to leave a sprawling desert drone base in Agadez.

US troops and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used drones to track jihadists and shared intelligence with allies such as the French, who launched air strikes against the militants, and West African armies.

But the Americans were booted out after they angered Niger's coup leaders by refusing to share intelligence and warning them against working with the Russians. The US is still looking for a place to reposition its assets.

A Reuters analysis of data from US crisis-monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) found that the number of violent events involving jihadi groups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger has almost doubled since 2021.

Since the start of this year, there have been 224 attacks a month on average, up from 128 in 2021.

Insa Moussa Ba Sane, regional migration and displacement coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross, said conflict was a major factor behind the increase in migration from the West African coast, with rising numbers of women and families seen along the route.

"Conflicts are at the root of the problem, combined with the effects of climate change," he said, describing how floods and droughts are both contributing to the violence and driving an exodus from rural to urban areas.

In Burkina Faso, perhaps the worst affected of all, jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a day on Aug 24 in the town of Barsalogho, two hours from the capital Ouagadougou.

The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) in Sydney said Burkina Faso topped its Global Terrorism Index for the first time this year, with fatalities rising 68 percent to 1,907 - a quarter of all terrorism-linked deaths worldwide.

"The two, big veteran terrorist (groups) are gaining ground. The threat is spreading geographically," said Seidik Abba, president of the CIRES think-tank in Paris, referring to al Qaeda and Islamic State.

A UN panel of experts that monitors the two organizations' activities estimates that JNIM, the al Qaeda-aligned faction most active in the Sahel, had 5,000-6,000 fighters while 2,000-3,000 militants were linked to Islamic State.

"Their declared goal is to establish Islamic rule," said Wassim Nasr, a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, a think-tank in New York.

Jihadists use a mixture of coercion and the offer of basic services, including local courts, to install their systems of governance over rural communities that have long complained of neglect by weak, corrupt, central governments.

"Come with us. We will leave your parents, sisters and brothers alone. Come with us and we will help you, we will give you money," said a man from Mali, describing his encounters as a teenager with jihadists who attacked his village. "But you can't trust them, because they kill your friends in front of you."

The young man fled and made it to the Canary Islands last year before moving to Barcelona. He declined to be identified fearing reprisal attacks on family members still in Mali.

Launchpad scenario

The jihadi groups operate in different areas, at times fighting each other, though they have also struck localized, non-aggression pacts, reports by UN experts say.

The groups receive some financial support, training and guidance from their respective global leaderships, but also collect taxes in areas they control and seize weapons after battles with government forces, the reports say.

European governments are divided on how to respond to the conflict. Southern European nations who receive most migrants favor keeping communication with the juntas open, nine diplomats in the region told Reuters.

One African diplomat said the EU needed to remain engaged as the issue of migration was not going to go away.

Even if Europe were to agree a shared approach, it lacks the military capacity and political relationships to help because the Sahelian countries don't want Western input, the diplomats said.

"We do not have any influence in those countries on extremist groups," said General Ron Smits, head of the Dutch Special Forces.

The other major worry for Western powers is the potential for the Sahel to become a base for global jihad, like Afghanistan or Libya in the past.

"All these violent extremist organizations do have aspirations of attacking the United States," General Michael Langley, head of US Africa Command, told reporters this month.

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Other officials and experts, however, say the groups have not declared any interest in carrying out attacks in Europe or the United States as yet.