Marrakech – A new analysis published by the US national security publication Lawfare warns that the Islamic State’s Sahel branch has built a logistical corridor running from West Africa through northern Morocco into Spain.
Written by terrorism analysts Lucas Webber, Peter Smith, and Colin P. Clarke, the report argues that Islamic State-Sahel Province (ISSP) has shifted from a regional insurgency into a “transnational terror hub” that recruits, moves money, and launches operations on both sides of the Mediterranean.
The authors stress that this corridor leverages smuggling routes, diaspora networks, and online radicalization to recruit, finance, and launch operations.
They also note that the number of volunteers joining ISSP remains far smaller than the foreign fighter wave of the caliphate’s peak, yet the group still carries “the potential to produce more terrorist attacks in the West,” especially while intelligence agencies and law enforcement stay focused elsewhere.
The authors trace this threat through the case of Abdul Ballout, a German citizen of Lebanese descent. In May 2025, the then 20-year-old made a failed attempt to reach Mauritania as part of a broader effort to join the Islamic State in Mali. He then traveled to Lebanon, aiming to continue on to Syria, where a military court sentenced him to three months for incitement to sectarian conflict.
He returned to Germany in November 2025 and was detained again at the airport. A Berlin juvenile court convicted him in May 2026 of preparing a serious act of violence and disseminating Islamic State propaganda, a conviction that carried a suspended sentence.
Two months later, he drove a rented van into a crowd at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day celebration and continued the attack with a knife, killing one person and injuring 29 before police shot him dead. The report frames his path not as isolated “homegrown” radicalization but as part of a pipeline “actively cultivated by ISSP.”
From insurgency to transnational corridor
ISSP began as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, pledging allegiance to the group in 2015 before being absorbed into the West Africa Province in 2019 and elevated to provincial status in 2022.
The report traces the group’s transnational character to its first emir, Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, described as a longtime Sahrawi militant and the grandson of an influential Sahrawi politician.
Since his death in 2021, ISSP has restructured around a more diverse mix of members, drawing on the Fulani, Arab, Tuareg, Dawsahak, Songhai, and Djerma groups that reflect the populations of its operational theaters.
According to the report, the group has since layered external operations onto its core activities in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The authors argue that ISSP proved “dynamic and adaptive” in replacing leaders killed during “punishing French counterterrorism operations,” and that it built the corridor after several Sahelian governments ended Paris’s military role between 2022 and 2023.
It now relies on existing criminal and smuggling networks to run what the authors call a functional corridor along the Tangier-Strait of Gibraltar-Balearic Islands line. With the Strait serving as a chokepoint, ISSP uses land crossings at the occupied enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, along with maritime routes to mainland Spain.
The report also describes how ISSP consolidates its base at home. In parts of its territory, it offers itself as a protector to marginalized ethnic groups such as the pastoral Fula peoples, capitalizing on resentment toward national governments.
United Nations monitoring reports indicate this approach has increased the group’s power and influence, particularly in Mali, freeing it to turn its efforts outward.
Morocco’s dismantled cells and the European warning
Morocco sits at the center of this map, and Moroccan authorities have moved repeatedly against it. The report notes that a network dubbed the “Lions of the Caliphate in the Maghreb,” a 12-man cell spread across nine cities, was dismantled by Morocco’s Bureau Central d’Investigation Judiciaire (BCIJ) over its “desire to target Morocco” and funnel recruits toward the Sahel and Somalia.
A February 2025 network reached nine cities. A March 2026 Tangier-Mallorca cell financed fighters abroad while planning an attack in Spain, with three arrests in Tangier and one in Mallorca.
UN reporting also recorded a further six-member cell disrupted in Morocco in April 2026, with recruitment spreading into rural areas beyond the earlier urban concentrations.
A July 2026 cell dispersed across seven cities, including Agadir and Safi, where investigators seized explosive materials and a modified vehicle believed to be intended for a suicide bombing or ramming attack.
Beyond these cells, the authors describe a steady flow of fighters. Moroccan nationals remain among ISSP and the Islamic State-Somalia’s largest foreign fighter cohorts, numbering more than 130 in recent years.
Spanish authorities arrested roughly 90 people on suspicion of jihadist-related activity in the first eight months of 2025, some of whom had intended to reach Mali before shifting to attack planning inside Spain. The report adds that Spain’s North African diaspora, built over decades of migration, gives multilingual propagandists “a consistent and steady recruitment pool” they can reach without inserting operatives from abroad.
Islamic State propaganda, the report adds, now explicitly names Morocco, Tunisia, and Spain as targets, instructing recruits to stay in place and strike locally rather than travel. The authors describe this as a “guided-plot doctrine” that echoes the Islamic State Core attack model of 2015 to 2017, now adapted to African geography and diaspora networks.
That pattern of a blocked journey followed by redirection runs through recent European cases. A French suspect scouted sites in Paris after failing to reach Mali. In Austria, an 18-year-old Islamic State supporter convicted of planning an attack had also discussed traveling to West Africa to join the group’s fighters.
In spring 2024, an American man told an FBI informant he intended to join ISSP and booked a flight to Rabat, later charged with providing “material support and resources.” In December of that year, two Moroccan nationals living in Spain were arrested in a joint operation as they planned to travel to Mali after pledging loyalty to the Islamic State.
In October 2025, French authorities arrested an Algerian man in Paris who had downloaded bomb-making tutorials and posted masked images of himself before city landmarks.
The authors conclude that European counterterrorism remains focused elsewhere, leaving limited visibility into the Morocco-Spain nexus and fragmented coordination among the EU, Moroccan, and Spanish services.
“With ISSP’s growing capacity to inspire, guide, and direct attacks, the group could seek to exploit legal and operational seams within European counterterrorism defenses,” the analysis explains. They recall that terrorist infiltration of migrant routes already occurred with the Islamic State fighters who attacked the Bataclan in November 2015.
They point to the July 2026 surge of Moroccan migrants into occupied Ceuta, where Spanish media reported that several individuals were investigated for “jihadism-related offenses.”
The migrants returned to Morocco, but the report’s warning is blunt: “Treating the Sahel as someone else’s problem will invariably come back to haunt Europe,” which must do more to defend its southern flank.
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