New Islamic State Africa Video Features An Old Playbook

[duluxe]

On September 26, 2025 the Islamic State Central Africa Province (ISCAP) released an 18-minute video titled "Dawa (Call) and Jihad," showcasing footage of combat operations, religious conversions and executions conducted by its fighters in the northeast corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).[1] The video release was well-covered by the experts, especially since it was the first ISCAP propaganda video released in three years. Pressure in recent years by joint Ugandan-DRC military operations – Operation Shujaa – seems to have partially disrupted the group's propaganda work although certainly not its deadliness. ISIS propaganda in general seemed to have reach its nadir in 2023 but has partially rebounded although far removed from its peak a decade ago.[2]


Without exaggerating its importance, the video is interesting in that it provides a very recent and rather full summary of what the group says it is supposedly fighting for in Africa. The narrative, the script, that Islamic State propagandists in Africa used is an extremely familiar if polished one.[3] Grievances attributed to the Western Crusades (using footage from the 2005 Hollywood movie Kingdom of Heaven, a Jihadist favorite) and French and Belgian colonialism in the Congo segue into more recent images of the Global War Against Terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, with cameo appearances by President George W. Bush and others. Western aid and development programs (UNHCR, ICRC) are also denounced as "deceptive soft campaigns" promoting missionary activities.


ISCAP boasts in the video that it "has ignited wars on the Christians and their armies in the DRC and Uganda over the past decade, killing them, expelling them, setting fire to their churches and barracks, and cutting off their means of trade."


The rhetoric is, unsurprisingly, particularly pointed against Uganda. Since the leadership of ISCAP still seems to be made up mostly of Uganda Muslims and the group originally flourished there before being pushed out into the neighboring DRC that is logical. Uganda also has a far larger percentage of indigenous Muslims – 10-15 percent of the population – than the DRC at two or three percent. The region where ISCAP is waging its brutal insurgency is still overwhelmingly non-Muslim, mostly Christian (which is why the group needs both converts and transplants from elsewhere).


The video may have required considerable editorial work but is still crude, if direct. The setting of the narrative is accompanied by images of the usual IS mayhem – combat camera, prisoners shot in the head in slow motion, a man having his throat cut, villages set on fire, the ungainly bodies of the dead, loot and weapons taken from the enemy – all set to a soundtrack of Islamic State anasheed in French and Arabic. Converts speak in Swahili, English, Luganda (spoken in Uganda), Kinyarwanda (spoken in Rwanda) and Arabic. The goal is to attract migrant fighters (muhajirun) from other African states.


The overall narrative, for an educated, open-minded person, makes no sense. Even if one were to accept the worst fantasies of anti-Western propaganda, what does a Black African worshipping in a ramshackle thatched hut chapel and precariously living deep in the rural and jungle regions of North Kivu Province have to do with George W. Bush or America or the Crusades? f The supposed willing converts to Islam featured in the video are mostly barefoot and bedraggled young men and boys, some of them smiling for the camera. Hard to connect the vaulting ambition of universal jihad that is to conquer the world with such miseries and yet "ISCAP frames local enemies in global terms."[4]

But, of course, the video is not intended for the well-educated or the West but for different audiences – for locals who speak local languages (assuming they even had access to electricity or the internet) in Central and West Africa but (also subtitled in Arabic) especially for the surviving Arabic-speaking financiers, operators, propagandists and enthusiasts of the Islamic State franchise from far away.[5]


While the Islamic State still seems to remain a heavily Iraqi-led organization at the top, it has developed an effective regional node in Africa, specifically in remote regions of Somalia the group controls.[6] There, while avoiding American drone strikes and clashes with its Al-Qa'ida-led rivals in Al-Shabaab, the Islamic State is able to provide some help and direct at least some funds along indirect pathways and financial middlemen in South and East Africa to both ISCAP in Central Africa and Mozambique.[7]


It is in this IS safe haven that reportedly the Islamic State's General Directorate of Provinces (GDP) functions by providing, as much as is possible under such difficult circumstances, support and direction in Africa and beyond.[8] The reputed presence of such an enterprise in Somalia, and its emir, the veteran Somali Jihadist Abdul Qadir Mumin, are some of the reasons that the Trump Administration has increased airstrikes against targets in the Horn of Africa.[9] There were four times as many strikes in Somalia by AFRICOM as of June of this year than there were in all of 2024.[10] More IS targets have been struck recently than Al-Shabaab targets.


Africa in general is the land of opportunity for Jihadism. They seek to grow in potency and undermine weak states, and are well on their way in doing so in Burkina Faso, Mali and Somalia. They want to slaughter Christians in mass numbers and are doing so.[11] They could – along with the bandit threat – succeed in destabilizing Nigeria, a massive and volatile target. But Africa also serves as a type of stage or Jihadist performance venue.


The "old playbook" that ISCAP provided in their latest video then is a type of ideological comfort food, a recent yet familiar gloss on ISIS's greatest hits of years past – potted (fake) history, grievance, conversions and murder. This may actually not gain many converts in Central Africa but provides fresh content that can pass for "results" – action, forward motion, converts, body counts, blood – for consumption by the larger global Jihadosphere.[12] It sends a message, crudely and imperfectly perhaps, that says "we're still here and we still slaughter like before," as in the old heady days a decade ago. And for that there is, still, a ready audience.