Russian mercenaries fail to re-establish junta’s control over rebel-held areas

Initially welcomed, Mali’s 2020 coup has created deepening insecurity: with ongoing jihadist insurgency in the north and the capital encircled, the balance of power across the Sahel is shifting.

Mali divided

For 14 years, Mali has suffered deadly, destabilising jihadist attacks. In 2024 it withdrew from the 2015 Algiers peace accord, concluded with the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), for a far-reaching decentralisation programme but never properly implemented. The north and centre of the country have remained, directly or indirectly, under rebel control despite several major foreign interventions: by Chad following the first assaults by the Islamist armed group Ansar Dine and the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) in 2012; by France through Operations Serval and Barkhane (2013-22); the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA, 2013-23); and the Paris-backed G5 Sahel Joint Force (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mauritania and Chad).

The Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) have failed to regain lasting control of rebel-held territory or prevent civilian massacres: there have been thousands of deaths a year since 2021. Worse still, the Al-Qaida-affiliated Group to Support Islam and Muslims (JNIM), now allied with the Tuareg separatists of the FLA, has maintained its encirclement of the capital, Bamako, since autumn 2025, causing shortages and insecurity. On 25 April this year defence minister Sadio Camara was assassinated at his home as part of a bold military operation carried out by JNIM and the FLA in the now-blockaded city and several locations around the country.

Mali’s president, General Assimi Goïta, is ostensibly in power to oversee a five-year ‘transition’. Military officers in his inner circle, who were responsible for the coups in 2020 and 2021, insist that these dramatic recent events are just setbacks which do not invalidate their ‘sovereigntist’ strategy for re-establishing territorial control. In practice, this has meant rejecting cooperation with Paris, which they view as ineffective and neocolonialist. The junta consequently ordered France’s Operation Barkhane forces out in 2022 and MINUSMA in (…)

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(2) Divan Citoyen, ‘Quelles solutions une sortie de crise au Mali?’ (What solutions for ending the crisis in Mali?), 3 May 2026, recording available on X.

(3) Divan Citoyen op cit.