Javier Villamor
December 17, 2025
Alberto Fernandez
Courtesy of Alberto Fernandez
Alberto Fernández is a Cuban-American former diplomat and journalist. From 2007 to 2009, he served as Chargé d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. He was then appointed U.S. Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea, serving from January 2010 to 2012. Following that, he served until 2015 as the Coordinator of the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), an initiative established to counter the propaganda of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Fernandez is currently vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
You have poor governance and wide-open spaces. You have societies with ethnic and religious fissures, poverty, corruption, security forces that are too brutal or too incompetent, or both. Jihadists also take advantage of and partially absorb existing networks of criminality—bandits, smugglers, poachers.
Targeting Christians is something that unites them all, and that is, of course, grounded in a Salafi-jihadist view of the Other, who is to be killed, expelled, or subjugated. There are plenty of traditions, history, and religious justifications within Islam (in the Quran itself) for the slaughter of “the infidel.” While such extreme views are held by a minority of Muslims, it is not an insignificant number. In 2015, Pew Research did a poll on the unpopularity of ISIS in Muslim countries and found, for example, that in Nigeria “only” 14% of those polled had a positive view of the Islamic State. But 14% of Nigeria’s population is 30 million people! And that assumes that others didn’t hide their pro-jihad views in such a poll. The number of those (and similar numbers were recorded elsewhere in Africa, in Senegal and Burkina Faso) who maybe disliked the group but somewhat agreed with parts of their message would logically be even larger, even if still a minority.
It is somewhat effective among the converted, but, of course, most people won’t see it. That is, it is intended for an audience in the region that is self-selected and already somewhat politicized. For example, there are very few Muslims in DR Congo, where ISCAP is fighting, but there are many Muslims on the East African Coast from Somalia to Mozambique. One of the leaders of ISCAP in Congo is actually a Tanzanian Muslim from the coast. ISCAP would like more of these Swahili speakers to join the fight in Central Africa. The propaganda is also intended for a foreign Arab audience—which is still the leadership of the global jihadist movement and which provides funding, guidance, and propaganda support.
You have jihadist groups loyal to the Islamic State, jihadist groups loyal to Al-Qaeda, and an even larger cadre of Fulani gangs, criminals, and militias—motivated by greed and religion—and all of them targeting a Christian, mostly rural and farming, population that has been mostly disarmed by a state that is incapable of defending them. The situation will continue as jihadists and Fulani militias (the two categories sometimes overlap) continue to push south into Christian areas.
The old joke is that they are too Christian for the political Left to care and too African for the political Right to care. The bitter reality is that Africa is, in general, easy to ignore. What is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world today? It wasn’t Gaza or Ukraine. It is Sudan—and yet, it is mostly ignored. And those are mostly Muslims. The West—which was originally, formerly Christian—has a ‘Christian’ problem both at home and abroad. Western elites are overwhelmingly liberal to left-leaning and secular, so the Christian faith, if sincerely and deeply believed, makes them uncomfortable. They have less of a problem with Muslims because they can see them more clearly as ‘the oppressed’ or ‘migrants,’ even though many of these so-called oppressed may be virulently anti-Christian, antisemitic, and anti-liberal.
Well, in Somalia, one of the countries most threatened by the jihadist offensive in Africa, the Trump administration has quadrupled the number of airstrikes on jihadist targets compared to 2024. Of course, in other African hotspots, like Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, these are countries that are relying on military support from Russia rather than the United States.
Europe is exquisitely vulnerable to a new wave of mass migration. The continent is emptying out population-wise, while Africa sees rapid population growth. So, you have, you could say, a neighborhood of emptying houses next door to a neighborhood of houses that are overcrowded and some of which are on fire. You also see, especially in France and Germany and the UK, the rise of Islamo-Leftism, where Muslim migrant populations vote almost exclusively for the Left, and leftist parties depend on them and come to reflect their views. This is what Sánchez in Spain would like to do as well.
Migration is already being used as part of a hybrid war and not just in the Mediterranean (Cuba was a pioneer in doing this 45 years ago). Morocco and Turkey have openly used migration flow as a tool of statecraft, turning it on and off to accomplish political and economic goals. Other countries—Algeria, Assad’s Syria—used similar rhetoric. And the Russians, who have an important footprint in the Sahel, have also used migration as a weapon elsewhere—they tried it against Poland in Belarus.
