WIREDGOV

The latest attacks, following months of JNIM raids on Mali’s vital fuel supplies, show the need for negotiation at a regional, national and local level.

Jihadist and Tuareg separatist militants launched a sequence of shocking attacks across Mali on 25-26 April. The unprecedented scale, geographical spread and levels of coordination demonstrated by the strikes has sent shockwaves across West Africa. 

The attacks have also fundamentally challenged the narrative of regained sovereignty and security projected by the military leaders of Mali and its partners in the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) – a group of three military governments that broke away from the regional ECOWAS bloc in January 2025.

Key towns – from Kidal in the desert far north to Kati, a key garrison town near the capital, Bamako, 1500 km to the southwest – were targeted simultaneously. The defence minister Sadio Camara, architect of the ruling junta’s military alliance with Russia, is dead, killed by a suicide vehicle bomb attack on his home; the chief of intelligence is reported gravely injured. For days, nothing was heard from Mali’s President Assimi Goïta, though on 28 April he appeared in a televised address. 

The Al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist coalition, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), and the secular Tuareg Front de libération de l’Azawad (FLA), have openly acknowledged their new alliance – restoring a partnership that previously existed only in 2011-2012 and briefly in 2014. 

This assault on the heart of the regime exposed the frailty of its intelligence networks. And the FLA and JNIM’s seizure of Kidal, the historic ‘capital’ of Tuareg nationalism, has badly bruised the government’s prestige. Russian Africa Corps mercenaries, assigned to defend the town, were forced to negotiate a humiliating withdrawal – laying bare the limits of Moscow’s ability to support its Sahelian allies.