NAIROBI, Kenya — Late last year, the Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow produced a powerful short called “Last Days,” about the dangers and depredations of “ivory-funded terrorism.” Viewers — and Ms. Bigelow’s celebrity friends — were encouraged to share #LastDays on social media, which many duly did. Their efforts gave yet another boost to the widely accepted belief that terrorists across Africa are killing elephants and selling the ivory to finance their attacks. But like her full-length feature film “Zero Dark Thirty,” Ms. Bigelow is offering a beguiling story divorced from reality.

She is not alone in accepting the ivory-terrorism connection. It has been widely reported that Al Qaeda’s East Africa branch, the Shabab, uses ivory sales to fund deadly attacks like the one on Nairobi’s Westgate mall in 2013. Some also claim that Boko Haram, Islamic State’s West Africa affiliate, is in part underwritten by ivory. Hillary Clinton and other politicians have made repeated assertions that ivory funds terrorism. There is “growing evidence that the terrorist groups stalking Africa, including the Shabab with its horrific attack on the mall in Nairobi, fund their terrorist activities to a great extent from ivory trafficking,” Ms. Clinton said in 2013 at a meeting of her Clinton Global Initiative, where $80 million was promised to fight poaching. It is a message with broad popular appeal: Save the elephants and stop terrorists at the same time.

Yet there’s no credible evidence that international terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State are involved. And though it is true that murderous regional militias like the Lord’s Resistance Army and Sudan’s Janjaweed deal in illegal ivory, unlike the Shabab, Boko Haram or the Islamic State, they do not have an expansionist ideology with international aspirations.

Why does that matter? Perhaps differentiating between global terrorists and regional militias is making a distinction without a difference. After all, terrorists are bad and poaching is bad so why fuss over the details?