Senior figures in Mali’s regime, including the defense minister and the intelligence chief, have been killed. Wagner fighters narrowly saved the government from a coup last week. Now the country faces a Syrian scenario.
The regime has bet on Moscow as it defends its sovereignty against Western neo-colonialism. Now it is losing ground to an armed opposition that includes Islamist terrorists.
The West’s role is ambiguous.
Mali has been a thorn in the West’s side in recent years. When soldiers overthrew an authoritarian government dependent on Paris six years ago, they were celebrated in the streets of Bamako. Few cared about the continued presence of the former colonial power.
Angry France
France had been welcomed 10 years earlier because its military intervention saved the regime of the day from the rise of the Islamists. Mali then became the center of several counterterrorism missions led by France, the EU or the UN.
The failure of those missions, doubts about French interests, corruption and electoral fraud all contributed to the coup. The military government turned to Wagner shortly after taking power, angering France. When Paris began pressing Bamako not to work with the Russians, the generals declared a sovereigntist course and sent the French home, along with everyone else except the Russians.
It did not stop with Mali. Generals in neighboring countries took the same route. The Alliance of Sahel States, made up of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, was later formed with the aim of creating a confederation cemented by a common struggle against Islamists and a policy of independence from neo-colonial powers.
Those patriotic military regimes have bet on Russian support because they expect less interference and more decisive military assistance from Moscow than from Paris or Washington.
Russia’s Interests
Russia does not usually meddle too much in domestic affairs. Nor does it need Africa’s natural resources. That, however, also gives Moscow little incentive to become more deeply involved militarily. Compared with Ukraine, where it is fighting for vital interests, or Syria, where it has significant strategic interests at stake, including a Mediterranean port, the Sahel is not a priority.
Moscow’s involvement complicates life for its Western rivals, but otherwise leaves the region to Wagner, a semi-official mercenary force now known as Africa Corps. Its numbers in Mali are estimated at 2,000. That may be enough to protect the government, but not to fight insurgents across a territory twice the size of Ukraine.
The failure to defeat the rebels cannot be blamed on military shortcomings alone. The problem has no purely military solution. The Tuareg, Berber pastoralists who inhabit the east, have little in common with the tribes of the south, where the country’s political and economic center is located.
Their demands for autonomy are not unrealistic. The government concluded an autonomy agreement with the Tuareg 10 years ago. As several times before, the deal was brokered by Algeria, which has managed to integrate its own Tuareg. The agreement was never implemented, however, and the low-intensity conflict continued. When the military government terminated the deal three years ago, it caused resentment in Algeria.
The Tuareg and the Kurds
The Tuareg share a fate similar to the Kurds. They dream of independence across a vast territory divided by the borders of several states, and they are willing to fight for that dream. They have repeatedly risen up in Mali, Niger and Libya. External players can use that ambition to weaken inconvenient regimes. Supporting the Tuareg against the government in Bamako seems as natural to the West as supporting the Kurds against Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad, or the current efforts to pit Iranian Kurds against Tehran.
The Malian government would do better to reach its own deal with the Tuareg rather than leave them to its enemies.
Bamako appears unable to reach an agreement with the other branch of the armed opposition, the Islamists of Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM). The group emerged from al-Qaeda and seeks to establish a caliphate. Today, it is drawing inspiration from the success of its brother-in-arms, Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who put on a Western-style suit and took over Syria last year.
They have surely also noticed that his path to power did not lead through an agreement with Assad, but through one with the West. Over the past year, the Islamists have also spoken less about their links to al-Qaeda, which seems to have helped make this year’s alliance with the more secular-leaning Tuareg possible. Yet while Islamists may find inspiration in Syria, the example should serve as a warning to the Tuareg. With the rise of an Islamist government in Damascus, the Americans turned away from the Syrian Kurds.
What Happened in Mali?
In early February, Nick Checker, the new head of the US State Department’s Africa desk, traveled to all three countries of the Sahel alliance. Most African victims of Islamist terrorism are in the Sahel, and Washington also regards local terrorist networks as a threat to the United States.
The US diplomat came with a double message. Trump is interested in renewed military cooperation and, unlike Biden, will not be bothered by demands for democracy. He is asking local governments to open their airspace to US aircraft and drones for intelligence gathering, and perhaps even to strike Islamist terrorists. He is probably no longer insisting that they send Wagner fighters back to Russia – a demand that closed the door to the Sahel for both Macron and Biden.
Checker appears to have reached agreement with local leaders on several issues. Their anti-colonial policy was aimed from the outset primarily at France and much less at the United States, which had not been very present in the region. The US request for access did imply a limit on sovereignty, but with the aim of fighting a common enemy. A few weeks after the visit, the Americans lifted sanctions on Malian officials, and in a recent Senate hearing on Africa, Checker spoke respectfully of the Sahel states.
Yet foreign support can be suspected behind the current Tuareg and Islamist offensive. No one, of course, claims to support Islamist terrorists. The same was true in Syria, although Syrian Islamists relied on Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Support for the Tuareg is different, as it was with the Syrian Kurds and the Syrian “democratic” opposition.
Who is supporting the Malian Tuareg today?
Algeria is an obvious candidate. Relations with the Malian government are below freezing. Not only has Bamako thrown the Algerian-brokered agreement into the bin and repeatedly accused Algeria of supporting the Malian Tuareg, it has also sided with Morocco, which it regards as a strategic partner, in the long-running dispute between Algeria and Morocco over West Africa. Fourteen days before the offensive, Mali withdrew its recognition of the Polisario Front, the Algerian-backed movement seeking independence for Western Sahara. For Algiers, that may have been one provocation too many.
Ukraine Also in the Game
Surprisingly, Ukraine is also in the game. It has enough problems of its own, but in July 2024 its military intelligence publicly signaled that rebels in Mali had received “the necessary information and not just information”, helping them carry out a successful operation “against Russian war criminals”. The Malian government later responded by cutting diplomatic relations with Kyiv.
The Ukrainians are similarly active in Sudan. If they are operating abroad rather than on the domestic battlefield, where they otherwise need every drone and every intelligence officer, they are acting at the behest of their Western sponsors, who sometimes need to hire someone to do their dirty work.
In big politics, then, we are seeing a pattern familiar from the 1990s, when unscrupulous businessmen settled disputes by hiring Ukrainians against one another.
And what about the Western powers?
The arch-enemy of the government in Bamako, and at the same time a key supporter of Ukraine, is France. It has worked with the Tuareg for a long time. When it overthrew Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, it persuaded the Tuareg to leave Gaddafi’s forces on the understanding that it would support their claims in Mali. Yet when Mali began to crumble under pressure from separatists and Islamists, Paris sent troops there in 2013 to support the central government. That marked the start of direct French involvement, which would end with the military coup already mentioned.
After the coup, the Tuareg again became useful as leverage against the regime that had expelled the French from Mali. The fact that the regime is trying to make a deal with Trump should not deter Macron at all.
US involvement cannot be ruled out either. Washington can pursue one policy through the State Department and another through the Pentagon or the CIA. The two tracks may be coordinated, or they may even conflict. It would not be the first time. Anyone backing the Malian opposition today knows full well that such support also goes to the Islamists, who are the official enemy. Perhaps some in the West have already spotted a new al-Jolani in their ranks and are preparing a Western-style suit for him.