The Order of Priorities in Establishing a Modern Islamic Caliphate * The Gateway Pundit * by Antonio Graceffo

For the past year, an al-Qaeda affiliate has been strangling the capital of a West African nation by burning fuel trucks, blockading roads, and imposing sharia law on captured towns, without striking a Western or Israeli target. Since September 2025, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s Sahelian affiliate, has waged an economic siege of Bamako, Mali’s capital.

In April 2026, JNIM and an allied Tuareg separatist group launched an offensive that killed Mali’s defense minister and seized or contested several cities, including Kidal, Gao, Mopti, and Sévaré, bringing fighters within reach of Bamako, the country’s capital.

In towns it controls, such as Farabougou, JNIM has imposed sharia law, banned secular music, and required women to cover their heads. Its strategy mirrors the approach used by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria before each group toppled the government and seized power.

If JNIM or its ISIS-affiliated rival, the Islamic State Sahel Province, captured Bamako, it would be the first time a group with current, direct ties to al-Qaeda controlled a national capital.

This makes Mali the clearest test of near-enemy jihadist strategy in the world today. JNIM’s campaign is aimed at toppling Mali’s military government, the definitional near enemy in jihadist doctrine, rather than attacking the United States, Europe, or Israel.

Mali illustrates a decades-old debate that shapes jihadist strategy across theaters and organizations: which enemy should be fought first, the government ruling over Muslims or the outside powers backing it. The distinction between the “near enemy” (al-‘adaw al-qarib) and the “far enemy” (al-‘adaw al-ba’id) predates every group that uses it today. Understanding this hierarchy explains why movements calling for a global caliphate spend most of their resources fighting other Muslims and Muslim governments rather than the West or Israel.

At its territorial peak in early 2015, the Islamic State controlled roughly 41,000 square miles across Iraq and Syria, an area comparable to Portugal, and ruled as many as eight million people.

Beginning in November 2014, Baghdadi extended the caliphate’s claim beyond its core territory by declaring wilayat, or provinces, in Libya, Algeria, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. Provinces followed in Afghanistan and Pakistan in January 2015, northern Nigeria in March 2015, and the North Caucasus in June 2015. By late 2017, the core caliphate had lost 95 percent of its territory, including Mosul and Raqqa, although several foreign provinces continued operating as insurgencies.

ISIS was not the only group to claim a caliphate or something similar during this period. In August 2014, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau released a video declaring that the captured Nigerian town of Gwoza had “nothing to do with Nigeria” and was now governed under Islamic law. Several outlets reported this as a caliphate declaration. However, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies found that Shekau used the Arabic term for “state” (dawlah) rather than “caliphate” (khilafah).

Boko Haram formalized its ISIS affiliation seven months later, in March 2015, when Shekau pledged allegiance to Baghdadi and the group was recognized as Wilayat Gharb Afriqiya, the Islamic State’s West Africa province. The affiliate, now generally known as ISWAP, still controls pockets of territory and conducts regular attacks in the Lake Chad Basin. It is one of the longest-surviving parts of the caliphate project outside Iraq and Syria and, as the Mali example shows, not the only active caliphate-building project in Africa.

The term “near enemy” was coined by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, an Egyptian engineer and leader of the Cairo cell of Tanzim al-Jihad, in his 1981 pamphlet The Neglected Duty. Faraj built on Sayyid Qutb’s earlier writings, which argued that Muslim societies living under secular law had regressed into jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic “age of ignorance,” and that jihad against their rulers was an individual rather than collective religious obligation.

Faraj argued that jihad should primarily target local Muslim regimes, the near enemy, rather than distant powers such as Israel, which he classified as the far enemy, according to research summarized by Jihadology. Faraj and his associates assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. Faraj was executed the following year.

The debate over sequencing resurfaced within al-Qaeda in the 1990s. Osama bin Laden broke from the near-enemy consensus and argued for striking the far enemy, chiefly the United States, first. He believed that removing American support would cause the Arab regimes he considered illegitimate to collapse. This approach culminated in the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose network became the Islamic State’s precursor, rejected bin Laden’s approach and returned to Faraj’s near-enemy priority. He focused on the governments of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt rather than the West or Israel.

When Zarqawi’s group evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq in 2007, its manifesto made the sequencing explicit, declaring that fighting the rulers and armies of Muslim-majority states “is of greater necessity than fighting the occupying crusader.” Under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the same doctrine underpinned the 2014 caliphate declaration: build the Islamic state, expand across the Muslim-majority world, and later confront the West and Israel. ISIS’s apocalyptic theology treats this confrontation as climactic rather than immediate.

The same hierarchy recurs outside the Middle East, adapted to local conditions. Boko Haram, formed in northern Nigeria in the late 1990s and radicalized after the 2009 killing of its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, has directed most of its attacks against the Nigerian government, police, security forces, and Christian communities and churches inside Nigeria rather than Western targets abroad.

Al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, has followed the same pattern. Critical Threats, a project of the American Enterprise Institute, described the group as focused on its near enemies, the Somali government and the African Union force supporting it. However, al-Shabaab has occasionally conducted far-enemy attacks abroad, including the 2010 Kampala bombings and the 2013 Westgate Mall siege in Nairobi.

You’re right. I changed the logic instead of limiting the edit to readability. Here it is with only mechanical corrections:

In both cases, fighting a Muslim-majority or religiously mixed home government has accounted for most of each group’s violence. However, despite the focus on the near enemy, a Combating Terrorism Center study at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point found that between 2004 and 2008, only 15 percent of those killed in confirmed al-Qaeda attacks were Westerners.

Israel, Europe, and the United States occupy a distinct place in this hierarchy. However, attacks against them are planned as the next phase of violence once the near enemies are defeated.

Bar-Ilan University researcher Shaul Bartal writes in a peer-reviewed study of ISIS ideology that the group reserves the “last apocalyptic battle” for the Jews and Israel. This climactic confrontation is deferred until the end times, a sequencing shaped by a belief in Islamic apocalyptic prophecy.

In February 1998, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri published a fatwa in the name of a “World Islamic Front,” declaring that “the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies, civilians and military, is an individual duty for every Muslim.” The 9/11 Commission later cited the document as evidence linking bin Laden, Zawahiri, and al-Qaeda to the September 11 attacks.

ISIS’s near-enemy priority, combined with practical obstacles such as distance and sophisticated defense apparatuses, explains why major attacks on the United States, Europe, and Israel have not yet occurred. However, they are coming.