Islamic State – West Africa Province
branch of the Islamic State
The Islamic State – West Africa Province (ISWAP), officially Wilāyat Ġarb Ifrīqīyā (Arabic: ولاية غرب إفريقية), meaning 'Province of West Africa', is a militant group and administrative division of the Islamic State (IS), a Salafi jihadist militant group and unrecognised quasi-state. ISWAP is primarily active in the Chad Basin, and fights an extensive insurgency against the states of Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. It is an offshoot of Boko Haram with which it has a violent rivalry. Until March 2022, ISWAP acted as an umbrella organization for all IS factions in West Africa including the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (IS-GS), although the actual ties between ISWAP and IS-GS were limited.
Name
The Islamic State's West Africa Province is officially called Wilāyat Garb Ifrīqīyā (Arabic: ولاية غرب أفريقيا), literally 'Province of West Africa'. It is known by a variety of other names and abbreviations such as ISWAP, IS-WA, and ISIS-WA. After ISWAP formally absorbed the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (IS-GS), it was also differentiated by experts into two branches, namely ISWAP-Lake Chad and ISWAP-Greater Sahara.
History
ISWAP's origins date back to the emergence of Boko Haram, a Salafi jihadist movement centred in Borno State in northeastern Nigeria. The movement launched an insurgency against the Nigerian government following an unsuccessful uprising in 2009, aiming at establishing an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, and the neighbouring regions of Cameroon, Chad and Niger. Its de facto leader Abubakar Shekau attempted to increase his international standing among Islamists by allying with the prominent Islamic State (IS) in March 2015. Boko Haram thus became the Islamic State's West Africa Province (ISWAP).
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This entry incorporates text from “Islamic State – West Africa Province” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.