Why Liberia Cannot Afford to Ignore the Sahel’s Spreading Violence Third in a six-part series drawing on the Liberia Security Threat Report 2026, published by SafeHaven Strategies Consulting ahead of the Liberia National Security Summit (LNSS 2027).
In October 2025, Ivorian soldiers were photographed patrolling on the back of a pickup truck in Kafolo, in the country’s north-east, near the border with Burkina Faso. The image was unremarkable in one sense — soldiers patrol borders everywhere. But Kafolo carries a particular weight.
By Martin Sele, CEO and Founder, SafeHaven Strategies Consulting
It was there, in June 2020, that gunmen attacked a military post and killed fourteen Ivorian soldiers, in one of the first confirmed signs that the jihadist violence convulsing the Sahel had begun reaching toward the coast. Five years later, the soldiers are still patrolling, and the threat they are watching for has not receded. It has advanced. Liberia has never suffered a jihadist terrorist attack.
In SafeHaven’s Liberia Security Threat Report 2026, terrorism spillover is rated Medium-High — not because an attack is imminent, but because the conditions that would make one possible are accumulating on Liberia’s doorstep, and because the country is, at present, poorly positioned to see them coming. This is the threat in our report most likely to be dismissed as someone else’s problem.
That, in our assessment, would be a serious mistake. A Threat That Has Moved South, Year After Year To understand why, it helps to trace the trajectory rather than the snapshot. The Sahel — Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger above all — has endured more than a decade of expanding violence by groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
The most operationally capable of these is Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, an alQaeda affiliate formed in Mali in 2017 that has since become the dominant jihadist movement in the central Sahel. What matters for Liberia is the direction of travel. Since 2019, JNIM has been carrying out attacks in the coastal states along the Gulf of Guinea — Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Togo. The numbers tell the story of an accelerating spread: in northern Benin, recorded attacks rose from 22 in 2021 to 176 in 2024, with deaths climbing in step.
The International Crisis Group now assesses Benin and Togo as being in the greatest peril, while analysts increasingly map a JNIM corridor pressing south toward Togo, Benin, and northern Ghana. Groups that exploit forest belts and protected wilderness areas as staging grounds are, by their nature, looking for exactly the kind of remote, lightly governed terrain that characterizes parts of Liberia’s own border regions.
The ECOWAS Rupture Has Made the Region More Dangerous One development since SafeHaven’s report was first compiled deserves particular emphasis, because it has materially worsened the regional picture. In January 2025, the military governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — the three Sahelian states at the epicenter of the violence — formally withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States. ECOWAS has long been the primary vehicle through which West African states share intelligence and coordinate security responses. The departure of the three countries most affected by jihadist activity has, in the assessment of multiple analysts, crippled the region’s ability to share information about the very threat that crosses all of their borders. For Liberia, this is not an abstract diplomatic matter. It means that the early-warning architecture on which a country like Liberia would depend — to know that a network had appeared in Forest Guinea, or that recruiters had been detected in a neighboring border zone — is weaker now than it was two years ago, precisely as the threat it was built to track is growing stronger.
How the Threat Would Actually Reach Liberia SafeHaven’s assessment is careful to distinguish between alarm and analysis. Liberia is not on the front line; Côte d’Ivoire and the states further east are. But the report identifies specific pathways through which the threat is mediated toward Liberia, and they are concrete rather than speculative. The first is geographic proximity through Liberia’s neighbors.
Credible regional reporting has documented extremist-linked networks operating in Forest Guinea — the zone directly adjacent to Liberia’s Lofa and Nimba Counties — and in northern Côte d’Ivoire, where the Kafolo attacks occurred. The threat does not need to originate in Liberia to affect it; it needs only to establish itself next door.
The second pathway is the one the previous installment of this series examined: Liberia’s porous, under-monitored borders. The same unwatched crossings that move Kush, contraband, and currency are the crossings that would, in a worsening scenario, move extremist actors, weapons, or materiel. Border insecurity and terrorism spillover are not separate threats — the first is the delivery mechanism for the second. The third pathway is internal, and it is the one Liberians should think about most carefully.
Research on how jihadist groups actually recruit in West Africa consistently finds that their success has less to do with religious ideology than with governance failure — groups offer purpose, protection, income, and dispute resolution in places where the state is absent or predatory. Liberia has its own population vulnerable to exactly this appeal: economically marginalized ex-combatant communities, and a generation of unemployed young people, some of them now caught in the Kush crisis described earlier in this series. The conditions extremist recruiters exploit elsewhere are not foreign to Liberia.
They are already here. Why “No Attacks Yet” Is Not Reassurance It is tempting to read Liberia’s clean record as evidence of safety. SafeHaven’s assessment reads it differently: as a window that is still open but narrowing. Liberia’s own National Security Strategy frames terrorism spillover correctly — as a strategic risk to be prepared for proactively, not a crisis to be managed reactively after it arrives. The entire value of a proactive posture is that it must be adopted before the threat materializes. Once an attack has occurred, the country is no longer preparing; it is responding, at far greater cost and with far less choice about how. What Preparation Looks Like The recommendations that follow from this assessment are deliberately measured.
Liberia does not need to militarize its north or treat its border communities as suspects. It needs the capacity to see, to warn, and to address the conditions that make recruitment possible:
• Invest in early-warning and intelligence capability, so that Liberia can detect the appearance of networks, recruiters, or unusual movement in its border regions — a need made more urgent by the weakening of ECOWAS-wide intelligence sharing.
• Maintain and deepen regional counterterrorism cooperation through every channel still functioning, including the Accra Initiative and bilateral arrangements with Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, to compensate for the gap left by the Sahelian states’ ECOWAS withdrawal.
• Treat border situational awareness as counterterrorism infrastructure, recognizing that the surveillance capability discussed in the previous installment serves this threat as directly as it serves anti-trafficking.
• Address the governance and economic conditions that make recruitment possible, particularly youth unemployment and the marginalization of ex-combatant communities — the single most effective long-term counterterrorism measure available to Liberia, and one that overlaps directly with the response to the Kush crisis.
• Build dedicated institutional capacity for counterterrorism analysis and coordination, so that this threat has an owner within Liberia’s security architecture rather than falling between the mandates of agencies focused on other priorities.
The soldiers patrolling Kafolo are watching a threat that took years to arrive at their border and shows no sign of stopping there. Liberia has been granted something its eastern neighbors were not: time, and the chance to prepare before rather than after. SafeHaven’s assessment is that this advantage is real but finite, and that the worst response to a threat that has not yet arrived is to wait until it has. The purpose of naming this risk now — while Liberia’s record is still clean — is precisely so that it stays that way.
This is the third in a six-part series examining the threats identified in SafeHaven’s Liberia Security Threat Report 2026. The next installment turns inward, to a threat that erodes the very institutions Liberia would rely on to confront all the others: corruption. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Martin Sele is the CEO and Founder of SafeHaven Strategies Consulting, Liberia’s first intelligence-led private security consulting firm, based in Monrovia. He serves as an Intelligence Officer at AREPT, previously served as Assistant Coordinator for Joint Security at Liberia’s Ministry of Justice, and is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran.
He holds a BSc in Criminology from Drexel University and is completing an MPS in Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at Penn State University. His graduate research focuses on counterterrorism institutional design in West Africa. For more information, visit www.safehavenstrategieslr.com.
