A rising tide

By THE DATA TEAM

AFTER recent attacks in Tunisia, Europeans began worrying about extremists taking aim at them across the Mediterranean. But it seems more likely that the jihadist epidemic will turn south. The Sahel, an arid belt on the southern fringe of the Sahara desert that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, has already caught the fever from Algeria and Libya. More than a dozen sub-Saharan countries are now dealing with jihadism at home. Attacks in many places are a daily or weekly occurrence. Weapons are widely available, often left over from secular civil wars. Increasingly what drives African extremism is not just opportunity or firepower but ideology. No grand caliphate stretching from Mosul in northern Iraq to Maiduguri in north-eastern Nigeria is likely to emerge, yet a distinct flavour of poisonous thinking has spread across thousands of miles. Islamism is the continent’s new ideology of protest. See full article here.