Why Mali matters

At 05:20 on the morning of 25 April 2026, two explosions tore through the military town of Kati, fifteen kilometres north-west of Bamako. A vehicle carrying explosives had been driven into the residence of Mali’s defence minister, General Sadio Camara, the architect of Mali’s partnership with Russia. He died of his wounds despite being rushed to hospital. His second wife and two of his grandchildren were killed in the blast. 

In a sequence of simultaneous strikes spanning over a thousand kilometres, al-Qaeda’s Sahelian affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and Tuareg separatists from the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) captured the northern city of Kidal, partially overran Gao and Mopti, and seized military bases at Hombori and Tessalit. A Russian Africa Corps helicopter was shot down near Gao, killing its crew and the mobile fire team it carried. Russians were filmed surrendering to Tuareg fighters. The Malian junta has since arrested ten of its senior officers in connection with the attacks. By 28 April, JNIM had imposed a total blockade on Bamako. By 4 May, junta leader Assimi Goïta had appointed himself defence minister. 

It is time for the West to pay more attention. The question is no longer whether this threatens us, but when

This was the most significant offensive of the Mali War since the 2012 jihadist takeover in the north that prompted French intervention. It was also the first formal coordination between JNIM and the Tuareg separatists. Mali and the Sahel have become a de facto laboratory for jihadist warfare. Two rival Salafi jihadist organizations, JNIM and the Islamic State’s Sahel Province (ISSP), are building proto-states across a territory larger than Western Europe and developing capabilities to strike beyond the region.  

It is time for the West to pay more attention. The question is no longer whether this threatens us, but when. 

A conflict with deep roots 

Mali is a landlocked country of around 480,000 square miles, the twenty-third largest in the world. Roughly a third of it lies in the Sahara. South of that lies the vast semi-arid belt known as the Sahel. Its population of twenty-three million people cling mostly to the Niger and Senegal rivers in the savannas of the far south and west. The north,vast, arid, and desperately underdeveloped has been neglected by every government since independence. Temperatures in the country are rising at one and a half times the global average. Desertification swallows arable land by the tens of thousands of hectares each year. Severe droughts and famines have catalysed cycles of ethnic cleansingand communal violence. Corruption has been endemic; the coups of 1991, 2012, 2020, and 2021 were each justified in part by the embezzlement of resources meant for security and development. Soldiers in 2012 famously mutinied because they were sent north without rations or ammunition. Each rebellion by the region’s ethnic Tuaregpopulation has been met with cycles of repression and broken peace processes. The jihadists recruit from this grimly fertile soil. 

The jihadist armed groups originated from two external shocks. The Algerian Civil War of 1991–2002 produced the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which trickled into northern Mali during the late 1990s. In 2003, it aligned itself with al-Qaeda and the Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Omar. In January 2007 it rebranded as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). By the late 2000s, northern Mali was already rife with smuggling corridors, hostage-taking rackets, and warlordism. The shockwave from Libya’s 2011 collapse was the spark which began Mali’s fourth Tuareg rebellion since the country’s independence in 1960. Tuareg fighters who had served in Gaddafi’s Islamic Legion across Chad and Lebanon poured back across the border, battle-hardened and heavily armed. 

The figure who connects these threads is Iyad ag Ghali, a veteran of the 1990 Tuareg rebellion who served as an intermediary for the release of Western hostages held by the GSPC. He co-led the 2006 uprising but fell into a bitter factional dispute with Ibrahim ag Bahanga over the subsequent peace accords, which favoured ag Ghali’s Ifoghas clan. By 2011, he had been passed over for secular Tuareg rebelleadership and founded the Islamist Ansar Dine in response, which fought alongside the other factions. Tuareg rebels as they swept across the north, declaring theindependence of the historical region of Azawad in April 2012. As of early 2013 the jihadists were pushing south toward Bamako, prompting France to deploy ground forces. Operation Serval retook major towns in weeks, but the strategic outcome was pyrrhic: the jihadists dispersed into the countryside and reconstituted as mobile networks. A UN peacekeeping mission and an EU training mission followed, and France launched a wider counterinsurgency, Operation Barkhane, in August 2014. None of it held. 

The jihadists quietly proliferated in rural areas, founding the Macina Liberation Front (MLF) in central Mali by exploiting growing violence between Fulani herders and Dogon farmers. In May 2015 a former al-Qaeda commander named Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahraoui pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and was recognised by IS leadership in October 2016 splitting from the al-Qaeda orbit to form what would become the Islamic State’s Sahel Province in the tri-border badlands of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. In March 2017 four al-Qaeda-aligned Salafi jihadist groups including AQIM, an affiliated group called Al-Mourabitoun, the MLF and Ansar Dinemerged into JNIM under Iyad Ag Ghali as Emir. That same year ISSP carried out the infamous 4 October Tongo Tongo ambush against a convoy of US Army Special Forces and elite Nigerien units. The largest loss of American lives in combat in Africa since the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia. 

By the 2020s the military was demoralized and the population frustrated with the government’s lack of progress against the rebels. Two coups, in August 2020 and May 2021, brought Goïta’s junta to power. The junta expelled French forces in 2022, replaced them with Russia’s Wagner Group, terminated the UN mission, and withdrew from ECOWAS alongside Niger and Burkina Faso to form the Alliance of Sahel States. The EU ended its training mission in May 2024. Wagner formally left in June 2025, replaced by the Russian Defence Ministry’s Africa Corps. Every Western security institution was gone within three years. 

The evolving way of war 

JNIM, now estimated at six thousand fighters, has evolved through distinct phases: from kidnapping and rural guerrilla raids, through complex assaults using suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) against military bases, to the systematic economic siege of cities. From September 2025 it strangled Bamako by destroying over three hundred fuel tankers on the routes from Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. Fuel prices rose by 400 per cent, schools closed, satellite imagery showed the capital’s lights visibly dimming. The April offensive marked the transition: from siege to assault. JNIM and the FLA used a multi-pronged strike of inghimasi suicide commandos, VBIEDs, and motorcycle-borne assault teams to seize four northern bases simultaneously, kill a defence minister inside his fortified compound, and shoot down a Russian helicopter with what Russian sources concede was probably a man-portable surface-to-air missile. Every base the jihadists overrun provides captured resources which strengthen the next attacks. In January 2026, the Islamic States Sahel Province attacked Niger’s international airport in Niamey using drones, mortars, and small arms in coordination with Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) fighters from the Lake Chad Basin, the most complex cross-provincial Islamic State operation in African history. 

The technological escalation is equally significant. JNIM conducted its first armed drone strike in September 2023, dropping improvised explosives from a commercial quadcopter onto militia positions in central Mali. By mid-2025 it had carried out over a dozen drone attacks across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo, including first-person-view kamikaze drones of the type pioneered in Ukraine. A commercial drone costs ~$450 in Sahelian markets; a mortar costs ~$650. Analysts at the Critical Threats Project describe JNIM as the only non-state actor on earth sustaining drone operations across multiple countries simultaneously. In May 2025, JNIM fighters in Burkina Faso at Djibo repelled a fighter jet and a helicopter using 14.5mm anti-aircraft guns mounted on motorcycles.  

The future of Jihadist terrorism 

This cannot be mistaken for a local conflict. Both JNIM and ISSP have declared their intention to strike beyond the Sahel. In October 2025 JNIM claimed its first attack in Nigeria’s Kwara state, deep in the country’s interior, and released a video declaring its intent to establish a permanent brigade there. General Michael Langley, head of US Africa Command, warned in May 2025 that JNIM had expanded fourfold since 2022 and that “they could have the capacity to attack the homeland”. He called the Sahel “the epicentre of terrorism on the globe.”  

This means Europe as well as Africa is at risk. ISSP, though smaller, poses an arguably graver transnational threat than JNIM. Moroccan security services arrested a dozen ISSP-linked suspects in February 2025 who were planning remote bomb attacks across the country, with networks extending into Spain. A joint Moroccan-Spanishoperation in March 2026 dismantled another Islamic State cell with members in Tangier and Mallorca; the cell’s logistics nodes were funding ISSP and other African affiliates while its Spain-based operative planned a lone-wolf attack on European soil. The Soufan Center now assesses that the same networks moving funds and foreign fighters in and out of Africa are actively plotting external attacks in Europe. 

JNIM’s combined area of operations is more than twice the size of Afghanistan. The Sahel is not Afghanistan: it is a porous frontier spanning a dozen countries with direct routes to Europe via Libya and the Mediterranean, the same corridors that move migrants and contraband. All seven of Mali’s neighbours have been infiltrated by affiliated networks and terror cells. JNIM’s territorial expansion follows a deliberate southward and westward progression toward the Gulf of Guinea coast. 

A June 2025 report by Africa Confidential noted that JNIM appears to be publicly distancing itself from al-Qaeda, mirroring the strategy of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham which now governs Syria, a move partly intended to facilitate tactical alliances with secular groups like the FLA, which demands JNIM sever al-Qaeda ties. The Taliban attempted a similar rebranding strategy after seizing Kabul. 

The jihadists are no longer surviving. They are refining a model of insurgent statecraft, siege warfare, drone technology, cross-border coordination and infiltration of state security forces, in conditions of near-total impunity, against opponents who cannot meaningfully resist. The Sahel is on a trajectory toward a mosaic of jihadist-administered territories that no government or international body has the will or capability to dislodge.  

The American embassy has told its citizens to leave. The jihadists, meanwhile, are governing by their own rules

As of early June, the blockade has not lifted. A large defensive trench is being dug around Bamako airport. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso conducted joint airstrikes within hours of the 25 April attacks under the AES Unified Force. In the week following the offensive Africa Corps evacuated the North to positions the FLA is preparing to strike next. Russian attack helicopters now visibly escort fuel convoys. On 10 May a single convoy of ~700 tankers arrived in Bamako from Côte d’Ivoire. Meanwhile ISSP has been escalating its own campaign of attacks on military positions in pursuit of the “burn the camps” doctrine coined by ISWAP. 

The policy response is a void. France left. The UN left. The EU training mission ended. Wagner’s replacements lost a defence minister, a helicopter, and four military bases in a single weekend then retreated south. Bamako is now under blockade for the second time in eight months. The American embassy has told its citizens to leave. The jihadists, meanwhile, are governing by their own rules.