ADF STAFF
James was riding his motorcycle through northwest Burkina Faso on his way to Senegal when armed extremists abducted, blindfolded and took him back to their camp.
After insisting he was not a spy and surviving the terrorist camp commander’s interrogation, a horde of fighters returned from an attack and fired their guns into the air. James, terrified, did not realize the gunfire was celebratory.
“I thought that was the end. I was just sweating,” he said, recounting his 2019 experience for the first time in a December 2024 interview with the BBC, which gave him a pseudonym for his safety.
The camp was home to about 500 fighters, mostly young men. It was divided into three separate sections for commanders and their families, lower-ranking fighters, and captured villagers and soldiers.
James saw tanks and pickup trucks hidden in tunnels to protect against airstrikes, children wearing suicide vests and women with AK-47s inside of their burqas on their way to raid villages for livestock.
He was trapped in the middle of a bustling war zone.
The camp belonged to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), a coalition of terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaida. In August 2024, JNIM claimed that it killed 532 people, more than double its next most deadly months last year: 250 fatalities in May and again in June.
Most of the August 2024 deaths that JNIM claimed were in Burkina Faso, where the group launched large-scale attacks in the town of Barsalogho and in Nassougou village, according to BBC Monitoring senior journalist Jacob Boswall.
Burkina Faso topped the Institute for Economics & Peace’s Global Terrorism Index for the first time in 2023, as deaths from terrorism there increased by 68% to 1,907 — a staggering figure that represented one quarter of all 2023 terrorism deaths worldwide.
The index recently described the Sahel as the new epicenter of global terrorism. In the first half of 2024, reported deaths from terrorism surged to an unprecedented 7,620 in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — a 190% increase compared to the same time frame in 2021, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project.
“Even if during certain periods acts are becoming smaller in number, they are deadlier,” ACLED West Africa Senior Analyst Héni Nsaibia told Reuters in a September 2024 interview. “So, the fatalities, they are skyrocketing, and if we look at Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, all these countries are on track this year for it to become the deadliest.”
In Ghana, outgoing President Nana Akufo-Addo lauded his administration’s record in his final State of the Nation address.
“The first responsibility of a government is the safety and security of the state and its people,” he said during the January 3 broadcast. “I’m happy to report that our country’s territorial integrity is intact, and all our borders are secure.”
But fear is rising that extremist militants will inevitably spill into the Gulf of Guinea’s coastal nations, lands that they have long coveted and targeted for expansion.
Ghana’s government has launched a public service campaign to prevent young people from joining extremist groups. Mawuli Agbenu, regional director of the Accra-based National Commission on Civic Education, said he was aware of James’ ordeal.
“I met him in an attempt to sensitize tertiary-level students,” he told the BBC. “We will definitely have a way of engaging with him so that he will be an ambassador or an influencer within his community.”
Today, James is a farmer back in Ghana. He considers himself lucky that the insurgents’ camp commander let him go after about two weeks among the terrorists. He had pretended to be sympathetic to the group’s terrorist ideology and swore he would recruit for JNIM in Ghana.
“The commander told me, ‘I will let you go if you assure me you will get me more fighters,’” James said.
He never kept the promise but keeps feelings of relief and gratitude for his life firmly in mind, as the words of the terrorist commander echo with his explanation that James’ release was an exception, because normally it was “either your dead body that will go home or nobody will ever hear of you again.”
