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Title: November 24, 2025

GRAY ZONE BRIEF 24 NOVEMBER 2025

TRUMP WANTS DESIGNATE MB AS FTO

**Trump vows to designate Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization** - President Trump on Sunday revealed his plans to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization amid recent revelations about the Islamist group’s radicalism and growing influence in the West. “It will be done in the strongest and most powerful terms,” Trump told Just the News. “Final documents are being drawn.” The move comes on the heels of advocacy from think tanks and lawmakers in Congress. The designation by the federal government seeks to cut off financing and any other means of support to the targeted group, among other things.

MOSSAD EXPOSES TERROR CELLS IN EU

Mossad unveils network of Hamas terror infrastructure across Europe **- Israel’s Mossad said it helped uncover a Hamas-linked network operating across Europe, following coordinated investigations with Austrian and German authorities. Officials identified Mahmoud Naim, son of senior Hamas figure Basem Naim, as the plot’s orchestrator, with meetings in Qatar and assistance from operatives in Turkey. Raids in Vienna and Germany reportedly seized weapons and explosives intended for attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets. European services have intensified prosecutions and restrictions on Hamas-linked activity, while Mossad says it continues to disrupt dozens of plots worldwide since October 7.

GZB INFOCUS: Dossiers On Jihadist Terror Orgs in Africa

WHO IS AQIM?

AQIM began as an outgrowth of the Algerian civil war. The group, formed in 1998 as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), rejected the more violent and exclusivist tendencies of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and particularly sought to focus instead on attacks against military and government targets. The GSPC also sought to expand its presence in the Sahara in search of opportunities to diversify its fundraising sources and find new areas of operation, training, and eventually recruitment. At first this effort was led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a former GIA member who had fought in Afghanistan and who was himself from a community of Saharan Arabs, the Chaânba. Officials claimed Belmokhtar was killed in an airstrike in Libya in 2016, though AQIM never publicly confirmed his death and regional intelligence sources (https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/armed-islamist-leaders-libya-claim-al-qaedas-belmokhtar-still-alive) claim he may still be alive.

The GSPC officially pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2006 and became AQIM in early 2007. The GSPC and AQIM marked the first real transnational jihadist presence in the region, and they have sought through local relationships, basic governance, and military pressure to create durable space in which to operate and at times govern territory. Although AQIM has recruited widely and operated throughout the Sahel, they are strongest today in Mali, and are particularly strong in the regions of Kidal and Timbuktu.

The GSPC became a more entrenched presence in southern Algeria and northern Mali in particular, and its first kidnapping operations began in 2003. The GSPC also conducted its first attack in the region in Mauritania on the army base at Lemgeity in 2005. By early 2007, it was conducting attacks in Algeria while still implanting itself in the social fabric of northern Mali through marriage and business ties, as well as increasingly through local recruitment. Its kidnapping operations continued through the occupation of northern Mali and afterwards, accounting for a significant portion of the group’s financing despite persistent rumours that the group benefitted heavily from narcotics or cigarette smuggling.

Despite the split between AQIM and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) in October 2011, AQIM still played a significant role in governing northern Mali in 2012. It had a particularly strong presence in Timbuktu. Since Operation Serval, AQIM has reconstituted its units following a series of losses, including the death of Katibat Tarek Ibn Ziyad commander Abu Zeid in fighting with French and Chadian forces in 2013. It continued to conduct serious attacks against United Nations, French, and Malian forces up until the founding of JNIM, and maintained a strong presence then and subsequently in Timbuktu and to the city’s north, as well as from Anefis to Kidal and the Algerian border. AQIM has also conducted a series of attacks in Bamako as well as Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso under the auspices of al-Mourabitoun, which returned to the AQIM fold in 2015. AQIM has suffered significant losses recently, including the death of its Saharan emir and JNIM co-founder Yahya Abou el Hammam in a French operation north of Timbuktu. However, it still retains a significant presence particularly in the Timbuktu region, and maintains an ability to conduct operations.

WHO IS ANSAR AL-DIN?

Iyad Ag Ghali, the central leader of the 1990 rebellion in Mali, formed Ansar al-Din in late 2011. The group quickly emerged around a core of Ifoghas Tuareg and longtime companions of Ag Ghali, eventually picking up support from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). It quickly emerged as an important military force during the rebellion. It has claimed responsibility for the attack at Aguelhoc in January 2012 where as many as 153 Malian soldiers were slaughtered. Ansar al-Din maintained a powerful position in collaboration with AQIM during the rapid push to take control of northern Mali. The group largely governed Kidal and was very present in Timbuktu alongside AQIM during the 2011 jihadist occupation. Operation Serval swept Ansar al-Din, along with its allies, out of northern Mali’s cities but it remained active. Kidal and its surrounding region, up to the border with Algeria, remained a centre of its activity. The group conducted and continues to conduct attacks against French, UN, and Malian forces before and since the creation of JNIM. While Ansar al-Din remains orientated around Kidal with a composition believed to largely be Tuareg and Ifoghas Kidal, it and Iyad Ag Ghali also played an important role in helping federate Mali and the region’s jihadist groups, leading to the formation of JNIM.

WHO IS MUJAO? (MOVEMENT FOR ONENESS AND JIHAD IN WEST AFRICA

(MUJAO)/AL-MOURABITOUN MUJAO split from AQIM in October 2011, following accusations that AQIM was too dominated by Arab commanders and criticisms of its methods of jihad. From the beginning, MUJAO had a clearly Sahelian orientation, framing its fight in terms of historical jihads fought in the region in the nineteenth century and openly promoting its recruitment of Sahelian and sub-Saharan Africans. MUJAO controlled Gao during the occupation, but still maintained contact with AQIM and Ansar al-Din. In August 2013, MUJAO and its military command under the Gao Arab Ahmed Ould Amer (Ahmed al-Tilemsi, since killed by French forces) joined Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s Katibat al-Mulathimeen and Katibat Mouwaqun bi dima (“those who sign in their blood”) to form al-Mourabitoun, a reference to the Almoravid empire that burst forth from the Sahara in the medieval period and eventually conquered much of north Africa and Spain.

MUJAO split in 2015, with part of the group’s fighters becoming the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara under Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahraoui, and the rest remaining with al-Mourabitoun and eventually joining JNIM. One al-Mourabitoun leader was part of JNIM’s founding group, Hassan al-Ansari, an Arab fighter from the Tilemsi valley north of Gao. He was killed near the Algerian border by French forces in February 2018, along with a few other important figures from JNIM. Al-Mourabitoun has carried out some of AQIM’s and subsequently JNIM’s larger-scale attacks. The group specialises in complex attacks on ‘soft’ targets, such as the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako in November 2015, the Cappuccino Café and HOTEL TK in Ouagadougou in January 2016, and at Grand Bassam in Côte d’Ivoire in March 2016. But it has also attacked hardened military bases such as the attack on the Mécanisme Opérationnel de Coordination (MOC) in Gao in January 2017 that killed dozens of people. (http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2017/01/18/01003-20170118ARTFIG00383-mali-un-attentat-mine-la-reconciliation.php).

WHO IS KATIBAT MECINA?

This group, led by Amadou Kouffa and a founding member of JNIM, is one of the most active jihadist armed groups in Mali today. Kouffa was an imam known in central Mali for his preaching and piety in the late 2000s, when he became more radical (https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2018/12/03/mali-la-mort-d-amadou-koufa-un-coup-dur-pour-les-djihadistes-au-sahel_5392124_3212.html), possibly after having met Iyad Ag Ghali through the Da’wa movement, the local name for the Tablighi Jama’at. He joined Ansar al-Din in 2012 and began reorganising to wage a more concerted struggle in the central Mopti region. Originally referred to in press reports at the Front du Libération du Macina, Katibat Macina began operating more publicly after 2015, when it claimed an attack on the Byblos Hotel in Mopti, an attack also claimed by al-Mourabitoun. During this time, it maintained ties with Ansar al-Din, although these were not formalised until 2015 and even then not fully until the creation of JNIM.

In 2016, Katibat Macina began operating more seriously in the Niger Delta, an agriculturally rich area. It built a significant part of its outreach efforts around the discontent of local Peul populations, a lack of justice in the area, and social tensions that also helped fuel jihadist recruitment in there in 2012. It faced significant local opposition due to the harsh interpretation of the shari’a that it sought to impose and the efforts to curtail traditional celebrations linked to herders taking their animals across the river to search for pasturelands. Nonetheless, by 2017, a softened approach and growing communal conflict between Peul communities and groups of traditional hunters and local militias helped create a more conducive environment for the group. Since then, Katibat Macina has become increasingly implicated in these conflicts as well as increasing the number of attacks against United Nations forces in central Mali and Malian forces, occupying different parts of Mopti and also conducting attacks further south and west, in the regions of Segou, Koulikoro near the Mauritanian border, and also in areas around Banamba further south. It has repeatedly occupied towns in Mopti, and continues to operate widely despite Malian, UN, and increasingly French pressure. French officials claimed that a French Special Forces assault on an apparent Katibat Macina base in November 2018 killed Kouffa, only for Kouffa to appear in a video soon after, proving that he remained alive.

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