By Mohamed AG Ahmedou
Since January 2025, a heavy silence has hung over the plains of central and western Mali. A silence punctuated by muffled screams, unanswered disappearances, anonymous mass graves, and terrified stares toward military pickup trucks. This silence is shattered today by the damning report from the NGO Human Rights Watch, published on July 22, documenting the summary executions and enforced disappearances of Fulani civilians in several locations across Mali.
The report, based on 29 direct testimonies and numerous satellite images, draws a chilling conclusion: the Malian army, supported by fighters from the Wagner group – this hybrid body combining private security and the Kremlin’s unacknowledged armed wing – is leading a campaign of repression of methodical brutality against the Fulani community, suspected of collusion with the jihadists of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM).
“The Fulani have become the internal enemy par excellence, designated for armed vengeance without trial, without proof, without rights,” laments a civil society figure in Mopti, requesting anonymity.
Crime as a method
In Sebabougou, on April 12, 100 Fulani men were arrested in front of an entire village gathered by force. On April 21 and 22, 43 decomposing bodies were discovered not far from the Kwala military camp. No authority has explained their presence. In Kourma, Belidanédji, Farana, Sikere, and Kobou, the pattern is the same: targeted roundups, blindfolds, hands tied, and executions at close range. The accusation is always the same: “collusion with jihadists.”
Yet this confusion between “Fulani” and “terrorists” is nothing new. For several years, successive Malian governments have fueled dangerous rhetoric conflated a marginalized ethnic community with armed Islamist factions. This shift, initially verbal, is now having physical consequences: dozens of deaths, hundreds of missing.
The operationalization of this violence by joint Malian and foreign forces—in this case, the Wagner group—gives this campaign an almost industrial dimension. Testimonies speak of bodies found with their hands bound and blindfolded, of the executions of elderly villagers, and of young men taken away in vehicles with no return journey. Others were beaten with iron bars, their remains discovered hours later in pools of blood.
“They don’t make the distinction. For them, every Fulani is a potential terrorist. It has become a foregone conclusion that allows for execution without trial,” says a village chief from the Ségou region , quoted in the Human Rights Watch report.
Organized impunity
This report does not arrive on neutral ground. Mali is currently in a situation of regional isolation. Withdrawn from ECOWAS, relieved of the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSMA), and governed since 2021 by a military junta, the country seems to escape any form of international surveillance. Justice is muzzled, the media constrained, and NGOs are increasingly reduced to a distant documentation role.
The Malian junta, for its part, denies any collaboration with Wagner, calling the Russian fighters “technical instructors.” Yet, witness accounts and satellite photos leave little doubt about the reality on the ground.
“The fact that the military denies the evidence does not change the reality of the crimes. History will not remember their press releases, but the mass graves ,” says a Malian human rights activist.
Responsibility, as Human Rights Watch reminds us, is collective and vertical: Malian officers, Russian commanders, and civilian authorities, whether complicit or silent. All could one day be prosecuted for war crimes. But in the meantime, impunity reigns.
Civilians caught in the crossfire
In an ironic reversal, the Fulani appear as victims of both sides: targeted by jihadist groups if they don’t support them, massacred by the army if suspected of doing so. This dynamic, tragically common in asymmetric warfare, makes civilians the primary targets.
“No one protects us. The jihadists punish us if we cooperate with the state. The state kills us if we stay in our villages,” says a resident of Douentza.
The village of Kobou is a grim example. On January 23, soldiers summarily executed three Fulani men and burned about thirty houses. Satellite images show evidence of the fire the next day. This was a terror tactic, aimed as much at punishment as at dispersal.
Russia, the Africa Corps and the Changing of the Silence
As the Wagner Group announces its withdrawal from Mali in June 2025, replaced by a mysterious Africa Corps, a paramilitary entity directly controlled by the Kremlin, concerns are growing. The change of uniform does not mean a change of method. The military-Russian-militia alliance in West Africa seems to have only one credo: stabilization by force, at the cost of terror.
And what about the African Union? A body criticized for its wait-and-see attitude. Human Rights Watch urges the continental organization to break its silence, support independent investigations, and demand fair prosecutions. For now, inertia prevails.
A duty of truth
What is at stake in Mali today goes beyond simple security concerns. It is the credibility of a state, a continent, and international humanitarian law that is at stake. If killing without proof becomes the norm, if entire communities are stigmatized with machine gunfire, if silence prevails over the law, then all that will remain of Mali will be a field of ruins and suspicion.
The time for impunity has lasted. The time for reckoning must begin.
22-07-25