ϭ9 Volume 7, Issue 2 | March 2015 Counter Terrorist Trends and Analysis This article examines the global, regional and local contours of Islamism in the Sahel-Sahara arc of West Africa and the variables that have initiated and/ or sustained a tectonic transformation in the security dynamics of the sub- region making it a hotbed of militant jihadi activity of enormous geopolitical/ geostrategic significance. Introduction West Africa is a vast expanse of ungoverned and dangerous spaces, making it a turf of political unrest and humanitarian and natural disasters. In recent years, however, it is religious extremism which has placed the sub-region under the global periscope. Although Ansar Dine in Mali seems to have been significantly contained, Nigeria appears to have no answer to Boko Haram, and the insurgency is unstoppable in its inhuman savagery. In Mauritania, there is an emergence of a nascent but dangerous wave of extremist thought, especially since 2007. While Malian and Mauritanian Islamism have links with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau has extended his global significance from having links with Al Shabaab in Somalia to declaring allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Islamist vagabonds and execution squads in Syria and Iraq. It even makes sense to theorise that Islamist activities in West Africa have prompted a possible emergence of a ‘new Middle East’ in that part of the world. ‘Africanistan’, as an African replica of Afghanistan, refers to the Sahel -Sahara region due to the area’s similarity in rugged, treacherous topography and climate to Islamist territory on the other side of the Red Sea. However, it is not climate and terrain alone that have earned the region this name. Islamists’ Islamism in West Africa: Context and Enabling Factors Mohammed Sulemana