Why Global Jihad Remains Invisible To The West

Over the past decade, jihadist violence in sub-Saharan Africa has killed more than 150,000 people — a toll that likely exceeds the entire recorded history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including after October 7, 2023. Amnesty International has not called an emergency session, the university protesters are absent, and op-ed pages have been largely quiet.

Even when noticed, victims of jihadism disappear quickly from the news and from world concern. The Yazidis of Iraq were subjected to a genocide that the United Nations formally recognized in 2016, yet they are barely mentioned today. Michelle Obama was outraged in 2014 when Boko Haram jihadists abducted 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in Nigeria; she tweeted out the slogan “#BringBackOurGirls,” but then dropped the entire matter after a few short weeks.

Who hears about the Ahmadiyya Muslims of Pakistan killed for how they pray, or the Coptic Christians of Egypt who live under systemic persecution by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose churches are bombed and whose women are kidnapped and forced to convert? Add the intimidation of Egyptian liberals and journalists by Brotherhood jihadists. Nigerian Christians suffer massacres weekly — often daily. The Druze, the Kurds, the Christians, and the Alawites of Syria are experiencing similar attacks. With impressive consistency, those in the West who claim to be at the forefront of human rights battles ignore or downplay all of them. Jihadist violence erupts in Europe’s cities, yet to name it risks opprobrium, even penalties. Even jail.

How can this be? The ideology that increasingly dominates Western institutions is founded on “anti-colonialism,” which views history as a story of white oppression inflicted upon peoples around the globe through imperialist ventures. That same oppression, it is posited, is mirrored inside Western societies by a “white supremacy” that dominates domestic minorities. This framework sorts all humanity into two groups: oppressors and oppressed. Moral status is fixed according to one’s place in this binary schema rather than by actual behavior or culpability. A major corollary: the “oppressed” may not be judged or criticized.

The anti-colonialist paradigm has no vocabulary for when a group defined as oppressed within the West is an oppressor outside it. Adherents to this progressivism are, by the definitions of their own framework, made mute when confronted with a jihadist murdering gay men, Nigerian Islamist militiamen enslaving other black Africans, or men “of color” stoning adulteresses.

The policy of purposefully ignoring horrors committed by what has become a reflexively shielded category is devastating to every group across the globe that is terrorized by jihadists. It is a virtual death sentence to besieged minorities.

Jihadist persecution has reduced African Christians to an oppressed group across much of their own continent. But, because their suffering is inflicted by a “protected class,” it generates no institutional outrage. In Nigeria, Boko Haram and its offshoots have killed tens of thousands of Christians and displaced millions more. In Sudan, jihadist militias have razed churches to the ground and drag women off into sexual slavery — some literally in chains. In the Central African Republic, armed Islamist groups massacre civilians with a frequency that would capture international headlines were the perpetrators white. Across the Sahel, a region stretching from Senegal to Somalia, the combination of jihadist insurgency and institutional abandonment has produced a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the countries most affected by terrorism in 2025 include Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Syria.

The West’s human rights establishment built its reputation defending the very groups they are now abandoning. Liberal institutions in the West have been captured, gradually — and deliberately — by an ideology that assigns virtue and villainy by identity rather than by conduct. The result is a world in which most victims of political violence in the 21st century are largely invisible.

Until now, these victimized populations have considered their struggles as singular and isolated. Yet each persecuted group is fighting but one front of a “holy war” whose theology is the same, whose funding networks overlap, and whose casualty count, added together, dwarfs every conflict that commands Western attention.

A coalition of the victims and targets of jihadism — of Christians, Druze, Hindus, Yazidis, Ahmadis, Iranians, and secular Muslims and Jews constitutes a fundamental challenge to the idea that jihadism is just a reaction to Western provocation. Joined with the movements rising across Europe against the consequences of mass unassimilated immigration, it becomes the first coalition in generations built around the actual victims rather than who is permitted to matter.

Such a coalition does not need to be built ex nihilo. Federations of NGOs and associations representing communities targeted by jihadism have risen on four continents over the last half-century, from the coast of Nigeria to the mountains of Afghanistan. As resistance movements they have struggled within their national state borders, formed regional coalitions, gone to the UN, testified to Congress, and engaged in street demonstrations.

Kurds, Lebanese, Druze, Darfuris, Copts, Muslim liberals, African Christians, Yazidis, secular Yemenis, Indians, Arab reformers, and more have decades of struggle under their belts. A confederation is the logical architecture of a global resistance movement. In the last months, Syrian Alawites, Kurds, Druze, Christians, and Nigerians have briefed members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

The victims of the global jihad are working to persuade the United States and its Western allies to partner with this effort, to name the global jihad outright, to redirect funds toward and to protect the persecuted communities that have been so ignored. At our public launch, at a Congressional briefing, eloquent and articulate representatives of these groups appeared as a true rainbow coalition pressing Washington to grant them the standing that the major human rights institutions have withheld. Stay tuned.

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Charles Jacobs and Dr. Walid Phares are President and Vice President of the International Freedom Coalition, based in Boston.