Baba Hadiya never saw the suicide bomber who detonated the explosion. All she knows is that when it ripped through the marketplace it killed her sister, blinded her in one eye, and blew off her left arm beneath the elbow. 

Today, sunglasses shading her irreparably damaged eyes, Baba Hadiya’s face remains badly scarred and the use of her remaining right hand is severely limited.

We are sitting talking on the balcony of a shabby building in the dusty backstreets of Gombe, a town in northeastern Nigeria as she recalls that day a few years ago when she became a victim of the jihadist group Boko Haram. 

What, I asked her, did she think of those who detonated the bomb that took its terrible toll on both these young women only in their early thirties? 

“Those responsible are an enemy to us all,” she replied simply, “but I have left them in the hands of God.” 

Baba Hadiya is not the first and will certainly not be the last of those victims of jihadist terrorism in Africa. As events in the Kenyan capital Nairobi this week again starkly highlighted,the jihadist threat is now more widespread across the African continent than ever before. 

At least 14 people were killed over the past few days after terrorists stormed an up market hotel compound in an attack that echoed the 2013 assault on a Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall that killed 67 people.

Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab, claimed responsibility for both of those attacks, just one in a myriad of jihadist movements across Africa, many of whom pledge their loyalties to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS) group.

In a series of conflicts barely reported on, jihadist campaigns today stretch in two broad belts across Africa on either side of the Sahara Desert. 

The northern one hugs the Mediterranean, from Egypt through Libya and Tunisia to Algeria. The southern one extends from Somalia and Kenya in the east through Nigeria and Niger and on to Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal in the west.

Though in each country the jihadists’ campaigns and the ensuing conflicts may be fuelled largely by local grievances, in many instances they share the same ideological traits. 
It was the civil war and breakdown in Libya after the downfall of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in 2011 that provided much of the materiel support to fuel various jihadist groups like Nusrat al-Islam, a branch of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). 

Weapons spilling out of Libya’s armouries made their way along the smuggling networks that had long been established moving everything from people to drugs across the Sahara.

But it’s the Sahel that skirts the southern fringe of this vast desert region that has long been the epicentre of jihadism in Africa.

According to General Mark Hicks, the commander of American Special Forces in Africa, the region is now base to “probably the largest card-carrying group” of Islamic State (IS) members outside Iraq and Syria. 

Islamist groups in the region such as Boko Haram have used the vast and relatively empty area to hide, recruit and organise.

Now though the threat is increasingly spilling over into nearby countries. Terrorist attacks struck Ivory Coast in 2016 and have occurred in Burkina Faso repeatedly since then. 

Over the past year multiple suspected terrorists have been arrested in the West African nations of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. Last summer, Senegal historically one of West Africa's most stable nations, held its largest-ever terrorism trial, with 29 people accused of trying to create an Islamic State-style caliphate in the region. 

The trial’s conclusion was a timely wake-up call to a threat that counterterrorist analysts have been warning about for some time. 

According to the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, which is part of America’s Defence Department, the number of violent incidents involving jihadist groups in Africa has increased by more than 300% between 2010 and 2017. 

In turn the number of African countries experiencing sustained militant activity has more than doubled to 12 over the same period 
In total the jihadists’ campaigns have claimed more than 10,000 lives, almost all of them civilian.
“Ten years ago, the prospect that Nigeria would become a jihadist hotspot, let alone the world’s third “most terrorised” country after Iraq and Afghanistan, received hardly any consideration,” says Jacob Zenn, adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Security Studies Programme.

Professor Zenn says that only a few years ago countries like Burkina Faso would have been off the jihadism radar, but all that has changed. 

Likewise countries like Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, and Benin, who were considered to be relatively immune from jihadism, now appear to be on the cusp of being on the receiving end of more attacks.

With little fanfare these low intensity conflicts have sucked in troops from America, France, Britain and Germany, which in turn is attracting remnants of IS from Iraq and Syria.

The challenge such troops face was highlighted in the autumn of 2017 when four US Green Beret special forces soldiers and five Nigerien troops died after being caught in a desert ambush by jihadists in Niger, the largest loss of American lives during combat in Africa since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia. 

But it not just in sub- Saharan Africa that the threat is growing. Last month’s murder of two Scandinavian women tourists in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains by four men pledging allegiance to IS were another reminder of the jihadist presence in the north of the continent. 

More and more there are signs that the jihadists are learning from one another and sucking money and support from militant groups in the Middle East while turning North Africa and the Sahel into a similar jihadi operational landscape.

France the country that remains the main stabiliser and military force in West Africa now has as many as 4,500 troops as part of its counterterrorism effort in the region under what is known as Operation Barkhane. 

“The challenge for us is to manage the conflicts ... and stop them joining together, ” warned French president Emmanuel Macron recently. 

Time it would seem is now of the essence if that challenge is to be met. As Baba Hadiya warned when we talked that day of the bombers who devastated her life in northeastern Nigeria: “Those responsible are an enemy to us all”.