Mohamed Ag Ahmedou 07/17/2025
Mali is sinking deeper and deeper into a multidimensional crisis that neither Russian weapons nor the ruling junta’s martial rhetoric can mask. Since Colonel Assimi Goïta and his entourage assumed a five-year transitional mandate “renewable until peace is achieved,” the country has experienced an escalation of violence, with civilians, already suffering from a decade of war, increasingly targeted.
On Sunday, July 14, the city of Timbuktu awoke to a wave of intimidation. The weekly fair, the economic lifeblood of the region, was banned by Russian mercenaries from the Africa Corps group, the new incarnation of the late Wagner, supported by the Malian Armed Forces (FAMA). Livestock trading points were forcibly closed, and three civilians from the Arab community were arrested at the Yobou Tawo market without further ado.
Goundam, Koulikoro: Arbitrariness as a Method
Testimonies are piling up, painting a disturbing picture: in Goundam, a French teacher, a respected local figure, was kidnapped on July 11. No one claimed responsibility, no charges filed. In the Koulikoro region, at the Boumougnougou market, several civilians were rounded up and then executed in Kamissala, again according to local sources. The modus operandi: targeted kidnappings, often at night, carried out by Russian-speaking armed men accompanied by Malian soldiers.
Meanwhile, asymmetrical warfare continues in the north. The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), heir to the old Tuareg rebellions, ambushed a joint FAMA-Africa Corps convoy in Alkite, destroying several vehicles. In retaliation, four towns, including Talahandaq, Tekankante, and Intadeyni in the Kidal region, were bombed on July 16 by Turkish TB2 drones deployed by the Malian army. The official toll: three donkeys were killed and two wounded at the edge of a water well in Inkounfe, a town 70 km west of the city of Kidal. But the tragic irony of these strikes, militarily useless and humanly absurd, recalls that of July 8 in Zouéra, where four civilians including three girls, one 18 months old, one 4 years old and a teenager died during a raid on a hangar serving as a restaurant for the Zouera farmers.
One of the donkeys injured in the attack on donkeys in Inkounfe on Wednesday, July 16, in the commune of Kidal. The donkey pictured was injured by a drone strike from the Malian armed forces.
A diversion strategy
This excessive militarization barely masks the deep flaws in the Malian state: a bled-out economy, food insecurity, limited access to healthcare, or even non-existent access in 70% of Malian territory, the collapse of public services, and diplomatic isolation aggravated by belligerent rhetoric toward regional and European partners. The coup plotters’ incendiary rhetoric, fueled by nationalism and postcolonial resentment, serves above all to distract the population from the real emergencies: drinking water, electricity, employment, and education.
The decision to indiscriminately attack nomadic Tuareg, Arab, Fulani, Dogon, and Soninke civilians is not just a strategic error. It is a dangerous short-term gamble that fuels ethnic resentment, encourages identity-based withdrawal, and fuels the obscurantism the junta claims to be fighting. This punitive strategy, both brutal and ineffective, pushes the country further away from a way out of the crisis.
Mali, an archipelago of instability
Today, Bamako controls barely 30% of the national territory, and even less of its borders, which are mostly unmarked. The rest is in the hands of armed groups, self-defense groups, or jihadists, or subject to the rule of the strongest. In this context, the policy of permanent power grabs, both internal and external, cannot constitute a viable future for Mali.
As the shadow of Russian soldiers thickens over the sands of the Sahel, civilian voices are becoming dwindling. It is becoming urgent that these voices be heard, not as targets, but as pillars of any lasting peace.