Mali's Weakened Regime Faces Coordinated Insurgent Offensive

Mali's military junta, led by Assimi Goïta since his 2021 coup, is now fighting for its survival. Last weekend, al-Qaeda-affiliated militants and Tuareg separatists launched a coordinated offensive across the country that has shaken even seasoned observers of the Sahel's chronic instability. The assault killed Mali's defense minister, Sadio Camara, in a suicide attack on his residence in the garrison town of Kati. The head of military intelligence also fell. Fighters struck Bamako's international airport, seized the strategic northern town of Kidal after Russian mercenaries surrendered, and inflicted significant casualties on government forces and the thousand or so Russian auxiliaries the regime has hired to shore up its grip on power.

The offensive was not improvised. Jama'at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) and its Tuareg allies executed a carefully planned campaign using ambushes, car bombs, drones, and conventional weapons. The capture of Kidal reversed a symbolic victory the junta had claimed three years earlier. Jean-Hervé Jezequel, who directs the Sahel project for the International Crisis Group, called it "a major escalation in the conflict, a new stage reached by armed groups in the strategy that has driven them in recent years to attack Mali's main urban centres." Few analysts now expect the regime to last much longer—though most believe JNIM's goal is not to seize power outright but to force the government to its knees and extract major concessions.

The Sahel has become a crucible for violent extremism. The region stretches below the Sahara across Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and it is scarred by successive coups, humanitarian crises, and wars that have left it awash in weapons. Last year, just under 70 percent of deaths from terrorism globally occurred in only five countries, three of them in the Sahel. The conditions are textbook: grinding poverty, state collapse, sectarian tensions, and decades of conflict. Major UN, US, and French counterinsurgency and peacekeeping missions between 2012 and 2022 all failed. Few external powers want to return.

What fuels the insurgency's growth is not just the vacuum left by state failure but the brutality that fills it. Armed forces and Russian mercenaries have employed systematic counterinsurgency tactics that have alienated populations rather than won them over. JNIM and other militant groups have exploited this by offering protection, basic services, and coercion—establishing parallel authority where the state cannot or will not reach. Controlling populations means access to young men for recruitment and mosques for spreading influence. Control of roads and rivers means taxation of traffic and smuggling routes that generate revenue.

Ulf Laessing, who runs the Sahel programme for Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation from Bamako, said JNIM's immediate aim is to carve out an autonomous enclave within Mali—a model borrowed from Syria, where al-Sharaa and HTS built a state-within-a-state before launching their lightning offensive against Bashar al-Assad six months ago. The tactical alliance with Tuareg separatists follows a strategy pioneered by al-Qaeda itself, which encourages militants to build relationships with local communities. But analysts expect this alliance would fracture if victory came.

Laessing offered a sobering assessment: "I don't think Bamako will fall. The JNIM can't control large cities but they can force governments to their knees and negotiate with them and force them to adopt more of their ideology." He noted that JNIM plays a long game. "They can simply wait until the state authority erodes further." The regime in Mali faces not an enemy trying to storm the capital but one content to expand its grip on territory, resources, and populations while the state withers from within. The question is no longer whether the junta can win, but how much it will have to surrender to survive.