On 13 March 2016, three AQIM gunmen stalked the beachfront hotels of Grand Bassam, a Unesco world heritage site 25 miles east of Abidjan, killing 19 people including nine foreigners in a 45-minute spree. It was the first major terrorist attack on Ivorian soil. A decade later, the three hotels remain shuttered, and the country is still reckoning with what that day set in motion. The attack was retaliation, AQIM said, for Côte d'Ivoire arresting its operatives and handing them to Mali. An Abidjan court did not sentence 11 men — seven in absentia — to death until December 2022. Defence minister Téné Birahima Ouattara marked the 10th anniversary this March with assurances of strengthened operational vigilance. The southern coast has stabilised; Grand Bassam sits on a peaceful three-hour tourist corridor stretching to the Ghanaian border. The north is a different country. Mali and Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire's Sahelian neighbours, have expelled French and American troops following military coups and pivoted to Russian partnerships. That strategic vacuum has supercharged JNIM — the al-Qaida affiliate that swallowed AQIM — turning the region into what Acled senior analyst Héni Nsaibia calls "the world's most active zone of Islamist militancy." Terrorism incidents linked to jihadists have almost tripled across coastal west Africa. The tactical escalation is sharp. JNIM's use of armed drones exploded from fewer than 10 recorded strikes in 2024 to around 80 in 2025. In June 2020, Katiba Macina — a JNIM coalition group — killed 14 Ivorian soldiers at Kafolo near the Burkinabé border. Côte d'Ivoire responded by more than doubling police and gendarmerie recruitment in the north and opening an EU-backed counter-terrorism academy in Jacqueville five years ago to train elite units. The state is running a parallel development track in remote border villages: primary schools, mobile health clinics, vocational micro-loans for young cashew farmers designed to undercut militant recruitment. International development funding backs the effort. But the government declined to answer questions about a speculated US drone base or American troops sharing an existing Ivorian airbase — silence that signals the sensitivity of Western military cooperation in a region where neighbours have violently rejected it. The structural picture is clear. Côte d'Ivoire is now the buffer state between the Gulf of Guinea and the Sahel's jihadist core, absorbing thousands of refugees from neighbouring violence while trying to prevent the insurgency from metastasising southward. Dense forests and porous borders make containment an open question. The country is spending on both guns and schools, but the threat it faces — armed drones, complex raids, an ideology that crosses borders at the speed of grievance — is scaling faster than its capacity to respond. In Grand Bassam, Rose Ebirim still picks up litter on the beach and organises the International Day of Reggae celebrations, now in their sixth year. "After 10 years, I'm starting to sort myself out," she said. The nation is trying to do the same.
